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\i UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. 



GENERAL BUTLER'S 



CAMPAIGN ON THE HUDSON 



<^jex:0uxl %Axtxon. * 






^. 



IV/T// AN APPENDIX. 




BOSTON : 

PRINTED BY J. S. GUSHING & CO. 

1883. 



E4ol 



" In the first place, General Butler is utterly void of principle, 
so that there is no mora4 ground for confidence in him ; in the 
second place, his passions are so violent and so headlong, that 
they are continually swamping his judgment : so that there is 
no ground whatever for confidence in him, either moral or 
prudential." 

The above was said to me by Governor John A. Andrew, 

in a conversation I had with him at his house in Boston, some 

time in January, 1865. . ' 

H. N. Hudson. 



« 

c 



GENERAL BUTLER'S CAMPAIGN ON 
THE HUDSON. 



New York, Jan. 4, 1865. 

To Major- General B. F. Butler^ Co^nmanding Department 
of Virginia and North- Carolina : 

General: Under date of Sept. 26th, 1864, I wrote out and 
sent to you a pretty full Statement of my case, being advised 
thereto by Colonel Edward W. Serrell, speaking, as I under- 
stood him, at your instance or request. I now beg leave to 
lay before you another statement, the main particulars of which 
were noted down by me a few days after their occurrence, so 
that I feel pretty confident I have them about right. 

For the better understanding of the matter in hand, I will 
preface it with a few items from my Statement of Sept. 26th. 

Before going to the seat of war, which was in February, 
1862, I entered into an engagement with Parke Godwin, 
Esq., of the New-York Evening Post, to write for that paper. 
While in the Department of the -South under Generals Hun- 
ter, Mitchel, and Gillmore, I made that engagement known 
to them, and had occasional interviews with them, or their 
representatives, in reference to it. Soon after landing at Ber- 
muda Hundred, last May, I went to your Provost-Marshal, 
told him who I was, informed him of my engagement with 
Mr. Godwin, and asked if there were any restrictions on 
newspaper correspondence, or any regulations concerning it. 
I understood him to say there were none, and so thought I 
should not be wrong in continuing to write for the paper. 



2 GENERAL BUTLER S 

My articles written for publication in the Evening Post 
were signed " Loyalty," and published with that signature. 
Besides these, I often wrote private letters to Mr. Godwin, 
which were not meant to be published, and were not published. 

Soon after your grand defeat up on Proctor's Creek, near 
Drury's Bluff, I wrote a private letter to Mr. Godwin, giving 
what I believed to be a fair and truthful account of that ad- 
venture. I put the matter in that form, partly because I had 
some doubt as to the propriety of setting it directly before the 
public. Most of the letter appeared in the Evening Post of 
May 24th. As a private letter, it was signed with my own 
name, but was printed without any signature, the editor in- 
troducing it with a sort of voucher for its authenticity. 

On the 29th of May, General Gillmore ordered me to New- 
York on special duty ; which duty, he said, was to superintend 
the printing of some official matter to be published by Mr. 
Van Nostrand. The General, on giving me the order, said he 
would send to the publisher for me particular instructions in 
what I was to do. As I had, the night before, learned by tele- 
graph, that my son William was very dangerously ill, the Gen- 
eral gave me at the same time permission to go to my family in 
Massachusetts. 

My son died the first week in June ; and his mother, broken 
down witli grief and care, was sick nearly all the Summer; so 
much so, that at one time she was hardly expected to live. I 
was also very much out of health myself, from the effects of a 
bilious intermittent fever, contracted while on duty in South- 
Carolina. About the middle of June, I wrote to Mr. Van 
Nostrand, to know if any instructions had come for me from 
General Gillmore. He replied that none had come, and if any 
should come he would notify me at once. Not very long after 
this, General Gillmore was relieved of his command of the 
Tenth Army Corps, so that I was no longer subject to his 
order. 

Early in July, I was in New-York, and there received an 
order from you remanding me to ray regiment. As our Colo- 



CAMPAIGN ON THE HUDSON. 3 

nel was then in the city, I called on him to know where I 
should report. He replied, in effect, that he could not tell, 
the regiment being so scattered that he hardly knew where the 
headquarters were: "I do not know," said he, "but I am as 
much the headquarters as anywhere." The next day, I learned 
that Mrs. Hudson was a good deal worse ; and, being some- 
what perplexed as to my duty, I ventured to return to my 
family, where I was soon after so prostrated with illness as to 
be unable to travel. Owing to these causes, I was delayed 
from day to day, till I became discouraged, and resolved to 
offer my resignation. Accordingly I went to New- York, and 
on the first of September handed my resignation to Colonel 
Serrell, who said he would forward it to you, and that he 
thought there was no need of my going on to the seat of war. 

On the 13th, the Colonel, being still in New- York, as I also 
was, received a telegram as follows : 

"Butler's Headquarters, Sept, 13, 1864. 
" To Colonel. Seidell, 57 West Washington Place : 

" Find Chaplain Hudson, of your regiment, who has been 
ordered to report to his regiment, and has failed to obey the 
order. Take his parole in writing forthwith to appear at these 
Headquarters : if he fails to give his parole, have him sent here 
to me under guard. Your special attention is called to the 
executing of this order. 

(Signed) " B. F. Butler, 

" Major-General." 

I had been told you were a vindictive man, but was loth to 
believe it. This order looked rather threatening indeed ; never- 
theless I gave my parole at once, hastened forward as fast as I 
could, and "appeared " at your Headquarters on the 19th. As 
for your words, " if he fails to give his parole, have him sent here 
to me under guard," I thought them somewhat brutal in temper 
and spirit ; for you did not know me personally ; that I had ex- 
pressed an adverse opinion of your military leadership, was no 



4 GENERAL BUTLER S 

certain proof of a bad lieart in me ; and you had no doubt seen 
my resignation, which had been approved and forwarded to you 
by my Colonel, and from which you might have learned that I 
was suffering from " continued and obstinate ill- health, such as 
to render me unfit for service." 

I had schooled myself well for the meeting with you ; was 
thoroughly armed with the soft answer that turneth away wrath, 
though not able to turn away your wrath. I did not fear to 
meet you. Sir, for I supposed you to be so much like other men, 
that integrity of purpose and a fair cause would be some secu- 
rity with you. In tins I was mistaken. In due time I was 
summoned to an interview with you, which proved to be some- 
what long, and rather interesting — at least to me. It was very 
soon evident that you had called me before you, not for the 
purpose of hearing me or of learning any thing about me, but 
merely for the pleasure of browbeating and condemning me. 
During the interview I observed and studied you intently ; of 
that you may be sure. And, however it may have been before, 
I know 3''0u now, — know you like a book. You disappointed 
me much ; your wits seemed badly out of tune, your whole inner 
man distempered with unbenevolent passion. You put on airs, 
indeed you did, that were both mean and silly. 

Was it because I was a clergyman. Sir, that you thought to 
storm me into confusion or to strike me dumb by a coarse ex- 
hibition of Butlerism? Did you hope to get yourself honour 
on me by enacting the court-room ruffian at me? and this too 
in a place where there was no court to protect me against 
you, or, which was of more importance, to protect you 
against yourself? where you were at once accuser, attorney, 
and judge? You proceeded with me throughout just as 
though you were cross-examining a witness. But your repu- 
tation as a low criminal lawyer forbids me to think that you 
often work through the process so infelicitously as you did on 
that occasion. 

You first called me to account for having been absent with- 
out leave. But I soon explained this, so that you did not 



CAMPAIGN ON THE HUDSON. ^ 

seem to think much could be made out of it ; not much, that 
is, save as a handle for working out some other purpose. And 
so you presently left this topic, and, with a good deal of un- 
necessary swaggering and bluster, took me up on that which, as 
I knew right well all the while, was the real " head and front of 
my offending." In my letter to Mr. Godwin, already men- 
tioned, I had faulted your generalship in the military operations 
of last May near Bermuda Hundred. It was for this that you 
wanted to pinch and wring me. And when I gave you a true 
account of the matter, this, instead of appeasing your wrath, 
only seemed to kindle it the more ; perhaps because it placed 
the responsibility of the publication on those whom you could 
not reach. And here I found you thoroughly in earnest ; but 
I also found that you could not well be in earnest without play- 
ing the old bruiser. Your motive, Sir, was revenge, too palpably 
so to admit of any question ; indeed, I think you hardly cared 
to disguise it. And your passion made you unwise, or at least 
unshrewd ; its effect being, I should think, to disedge your wits 
and dismantle your judgment. At times you waxed pretty 
decidedly tempestuous, especially when General Gillmore was 
your theme ; repeatedly denouncing him as " a damned scoun- 
drel " and '' a liar " ; — language which, had you been perfectly 
cool, I doubt whether even you would have considered exactly 
'' becoming an officer and a gentleman." You seemed, indeed, 
to be labouring under some malignant hallucination about Gen- 
eral Gillmore, as though he were ghosting you, and to have got 
me strangely mixed up with him therein. At first, you insisted 
upon it that I had colluded with him, and knowingly lent my- 
self to some naughty designs of his against you. And when I 
refuted this charge, you then ventilated j-our inward parts, in 
effect, and nearly in words, as follows : " As for the great villain 
in this case, he is beyond my reach, I cannot get at him directly ; 
but, sir, I have got you : he has been making use of you as a 
poor tool against me ; and \-\o\y, sir, you must serve my turn 
against him." In proof of my having conspired with him to 
injure you, you alleged that his ordering me to New-York on 



6 GENERAL BUTLER S 

special duty was a mere pretext for getting me out of the way, 
and that I knew it to be so. I assured you that I had no 
knowledge of the sort ; that I had received the order and 
acted upon it in perfect good faith, honestly believing General 
Gillmore had some real and legitimate work for me to do in 
New- York ; and in proof of this, 1 cited the fact of my having 
written to Mr. Van Nostrand for the instructions which he was 
to send on for me. 

At one stage of the dialogue, when you were trying to make 
me say something untrue of General Gillmore, my answer not 
being sucli as you wanted, you exclaimed, " That's a lie, sir ! 
a damned lie ! " which, though polite enough as coming from 
you, did not strike me as in perfectly good taste. That you are 
a brave man, I am willing to believe ; but I doubt, yea, I doubt 
very much, whether you would have dared to speak thus to one 
who was in a condition to resent it. Being a brave man, you 
ought not. General, thus to use the dialect of a cowardly ruffian. 
Remember, I pray you, what it is that defileth a man. And the 
next time you feel the inspiration of valiantness upon you, don't 
attempt to make proof of it by assaulting one whose hands are 
tied. 

At another time, on my pleading ignorance in a matter where 
you did not want me to be ignorant, you exploded nearly thus : 
" Don't tell me that, sir ; come, sir, you are not a fool " ; and 
t'len you added, with, I thought, more of truth than politeness, 
" You are an ordinary man, sir, an ordinary man." This, I be- 
lieve, was the nearest approach to wit that you were guilty of 
during the interview. And this was indeed pretty foir, though 
not nearly so good as I had expected from you. I had it in 
my mind to reply, " And you, General, are a very extraordinary 
man" ; but it was not my part to bandy wit or words with you, 
and so I refrained. 

In the course of our interview, you made several Scripture 
allusions, but I did not think you particularly happy in them. 
For instance, you charged me with malice in writing the letter 
to Mr. Godwin. I assured you otherwise ; that I was indeed 



CAMPAIGN ON THE HUDSON. 7 

very much distressed at the turn things took on the i6th of 
May ; but that I had all along, both before and after that event, 
been praising you and standing up for you ; though, to be sure, 
I thought you would be more useful, and do yourself more 
credit, in some administrative position, than where you were. 
To which you replied nearly thus : "I understand you, sir. You 
are doubtless familiar with the Scriptures. Was it not Ahab — I 
think it was Ahab," (you probably meant Joab,) ''who said to 
some one, ' O my brother, my brother ! ' and at the same time 
thrust his dagger into him?" "But, General," said I, "how 
does that apply to me?" whereupon you exclaimed: "You 
stabbed me in the dark, sir ! you stabbed me in the dark ! But I 
have caught you at last ; I have you in my power now, sir, and 
I am going to punish you." Again : I had occasion to remark 
that our regiment was very much split up and scattered. " Yes," 
said you ; " when the shepherd is away, the sheep will get scat- 
tered." I replied, " But, General, in this case the sheep were 
pretty well scattered before the shepherd went away." Indeed, 
Sir, I thought you must be rather hard up for matter against me, 
thus to allege my absence as the occasion of that which you could 
not but know to have sprung from the necessities of the service. 
You accused me of stealing from the Government, in that I 
had been taking pay without doing any duty. I told you that 
I had drawn no pay for any of the time since the date of your 
order remanding me to my regiment ; and that I was willing to 
lose it, if it were judged that I ought to lose it. But, as an 
offset for this interval of leisure, I then told you that, if I had 
been in the way to receive pay without working for it, I had also 
done a good deal of work without getting any pay for it ; that I 
was on duty in New- York and on Staten Island upward of three 
months before I could get mustered into the service, our officers 
in command assuring me, meanwhile, that I would be paid ; that, 
during this time, I did some very hard and important work, but 
had never received any pay, and had given up all hope of getting 
any. Whereupon you remarked, " That was no credit to you, 
sir; you expected to be paid." "Of course I did," said I; 



8 GENERAL BUTLEr's 

" for, General, I am a poor man, with a family to support ; so 
that I cannot afford to work without wages, neither would it be 
right for me to do so." I then told you, further, that while I 
was thus on duty word came that our men were suffering dread- 
fully for want of rubber blankets, and an earnest appeal was 
made to me to procure them relief* That this was for me a 
very hard undertaking, but I set right about it, and did not 
pause till it was done. That, after working with all my might 
for many days, I at last engaged some dealers to furnish the 
blankets, on my undertaking to pay for them when the men 
should be paid. That, accordingly, I gave my written obliga- 
tion in the sum of ^756.25, and thus got the men supplied ; the 
blankets being put to them for precisely wliat they were put to 
me. That, owing to some misunderstanding, it was a long time 
before the men were paid ; and when at length a payment was 
made, some had died, others had been discharged for disability, 
and the regiment, moreover, was so scattered that I could not 
get at them. That for two years I used my best diligence in 
collecting the money, and still was more than $150 out of pocket 
on that score. And that all this extra-official work was done 
purely out of kindness to the men and concern for the good of 
the service. I told you this in all honesty and simplicity, for I 
still supposed you to be a man. And I spoke of it, not in the 
way of complaint, but as a fair argument of integrity and earnest- 
ness in the cause. You replied to it all by comparing me to 
Judas ! and, as I did not see the aptness of the comparison, 
you then observed, that I had doubtless taken care to see my- 
self well paid for bearing the bag in that business. You, Sir, 
you were base enough to say that ! 

Once more : The current of our talk led me to assure you 
that I had had none but friendly feelings towards you, and had 
wished nothing but good to you ; and I stated certain facts in 
evidence of this : at which you turned upon me your most 



* About half of Ihc regiment liad gone to the seat of war before the other ha * 
was formed. Of course it was for the former that the blankets were wanted. 



CAMPAIGN ON THE HUDSON. 9 

eloquent look, and went to expressing, with tongue and eyes, 
the utmost contempt for me and my feelings ; in fact, you could 
hardly find words big enough, or looks black enough, to convey 
your magnanimous scorn. I was truly shocked, Sir, to see that 
pure and beautiful face of yours all marred and turned awry by 
so distortive an effort. " Bless us," thought I, " what if his face 
should marble in that shape ! 'twould be enough to scare all the 
gods and goddesses from their pedestals." Otherwise, I found 
no foult with your grim mirth, and I still find none ; for I really 
did not think myself worth your revenge ; and my greatest 
wonder all along has been, that you did not see that I was far 
too insignificant to justify any such emphatic notice as you were 
taking of me. Indeed, General, I must say, you have been 
hunting rather small game for a man of your size. But I 
doubted whether even your huge resentment could lift me out 
of my proper obscurity into any sort of consequence. To be 
sure, your violence, though unheroical enough, was in some 
respects rather flattering to me ; yet I was not altogether 
pleased with it. 

But I was much struck witli the disproportion, or what seemed 
such, between your scorn of me and your resentment of what I 
had done. For you spoke w^ith exceeding bitterness of the out- 
rageous abuse that had been poured upon you by the Press all 
over the country, in consequence of what I had wfitten about 
you. So, too, on my telling you that I should have resigned 
long ago, but for the necessity of being at hand to collect the 
money for the rubber blankets, you exclaimed, " Would to God 
you had done so, sir ! would to God you had never come here ! " 
Perhaps it was my vanity that led me to note these passages, 
but note them I did. And it really seemed to me that if I had- 
been, as I certainly had not, the guilty cause of defeating your 
aspirations for the Presidency, you could hardly have been more 
fluent of railing and bitterness against me. I have indeed been 
credibly informed since, that you hoped and intrigued for the 
nomination, first, at Baltimore, and then, failing of that, at Chi- 
cago ; but I am perfect that you never stood the slightest 



lO GENERAL BUTLERS 

chance at either place, nor would have done so, though I had 
spent all the brains and all tlie ink I ever had, in writing up 
your generalship. 

One passage of our conversation I am sure it will delight you 
to be reminded of. I told you, and truly, that I had often, on 
hearing you assailed, defended you, and upheld you to be a just 
and kind-hearted man. You replied that you meant to be just, 
but, as for kind-heartedness, you spurned the imputation ; that 
you were not kind-hearted, and you scorned to be thought so : 
it was too like the Yankee phrase "clever fellow," as applied to 
one rather weak in the upper storey. To which I answered, 
that I had used the word in a good sense ; and that I had 
found kindness of heart to be of some use among the soldiers. 
I noticed that, at the hearing of this, your countenance fell 
somewhat, thus slightly indicating that you wanted much to be 
popular with the soldiers, and that you were sensible you were 
not. 

I spoke then as I thought, but I now understand you better. 
And I acquit you of being kind-hearted : whatever may be 
your deserts, you clearly deserve no such imputation as that. 
It has been said that against stupidity the gods themselves are 
powerless. And so I admit that against the notes of compas- 
sion you have the strength of an ox, the firmness of a bear. 
Certainly my experience of you failed to discover the slightest 
stirring of a humane or generous chord in your bosom : touch 
you where I might, I still found you as hard as a flint ; and as 
your hardness is that of burnt clay, and not of any wintry 
congelation, of course no warmth can damage it ; it is sun- 
proof and sky-proof. If you are covetous of such honour, take 
it, for it is yours. Yet, I remember, General Sherman, in re- 
hearsing the noble traits of his beloved McPherson, that great 
young soldier — "the garland of the war" — O, too soon 
withered ! — mentions kindness of heart as among the noblest. 
But then General Sherman, like his fallen brother, the theme of 
his praise, is framed of other stuff than you ; being indeed as 
duTerent from you in this respect as he is in warlike achieve- 
ment. 



CAMPAIGN ON THE HUDSON, II 

And I shall henceforth be careful, withal, ho^^ I accuse you 
of being just ; I have tasted your vindictiveness too much to 
repeat that mistake. It is certain, moreover, that a man with- 
out kindness of heart cannot be just ; for in the nature of things 
such a man is all compact of selfishness, which is not the com- 
plexion of jusdce ; and it is not in him to know the power or 
respect the order of so high and sacred a thing, however he 
may counterfeit the forms and language thereof. 

You, Sir, a just man ! and comprehending no higher force in 
human affairs than terror and torture ! As for your sense or 
idea of justice, one half of it, I think, must have been in high 
glee when you juggled and spirited off — whither, O ! whither? 
— that $50,000 of gold in New-Orleans. For the other half, 
why, when a Shylock or a General Butler talks of justice he 
means revenge. 

Out of divers other noteworthy passages in our interview, 
I shall stay to cite but one more. Referring to my sacred 
calling, you scoffed at me as a '' hypocrite," tossed off a char- 
acteristic sneer about my unfitness to be a Christian minister, 
and then went on, in what sounded very like cant, to lecture me 
somewhat on the duties of that office. I made no reply to this 
at the time. But let me assure you now. Sir, that I am a clergy- 
man, " in good and regular standing," of the Protestant Episco- 
pal Church. You ought to have known this, for I had preached 
and ministered a good many times in St. Anne's Church, 
Lowell, where your own family used to attend. In this 
matter, however, I must demur to your sentence ; you are 
not the proper judge of me. Be content, I pray you, with 
your mastership in the art of war, and with the exercise of those 
unique graces which have made your name a proverb. A 
bishop's mitre can hardly sit well on the laurelled brows of such 
a mighty conqueror as the hero of Big Bethel and Proctor's 
Creek. 

Such are a few items of what I experienced at your hand 
during our interview. You charged me to my face with lying, 
stealing, fraud, and hypocrisy; you likened me to "Ahab," the 



12 GENERAL BUTLERS 

traitor- murderer, and to Judas, the traitor-thief; all this, too, 
when you knew you had me in your power, so that I could not 
answer your reproaches nor repel your insults. I do not claim 
to have given the passages in the order of their occurrence, but 
I do claim to have set them forth with substantial truth. And 
I think these specimens are a pretty fair average of your be- 
haviour on that occasion. What do you think of them now? 
Do they not something smack of what Hamlet calls " the 
insolence of office " ? Can you, on cool reflection, can you 
think it was altogether handsome in you, a Major-General in 
the army of the United States, thus to insult over a minister of 
the Gospel, who was in your power, and could not help himself 
against you ? Have you read, and do you remember, the well- 
known saying of Burke, that " the hatefuUest part of tyranny is 
its contumelies " ? For myself, permit me to say, that I cannot 
think the performance was very creditable to you either as a 
gentleman, a general, a lawyer, or a theologian. It seems 
hardly possible that such an achievement should have come by 
imitation, so I suppose it was purely the result of character. Yet 
I am persuaded that you would have made a much better showing 
of your parts, had you deigned to exercise a little of that kind- 
heartedness which you so pointedly disclaimed. Malice, -Gen- 
eral, malice is a potent stultifier. 

It is not for me to boast, and I certainly have nothing to 
boast of in this affair; but I believe I bore your savage inso- 
lence tolerably well, considering the inflammable stuff" which 
my friends tell me I am made of. But, whether I bore it like 
a man or not, I certainly felt it as a man. And I am bold to 
say, that " if I blushed, it was to see a general want manners." 
I felt, too, more than once, a pinch of grief, that the higher 
officers of our army, soldiers and gentlemen as they are, who 
know what belongs to honour and civility and manhood, should 
have such a low-minded savage consorted with them. But I 
do not remember to have been once betrayed into any loss of 
temper or of self-control. The interview, I confess, was not 
perfecdy delightful to me ; yet I thought you enjoyed it rather 
less than I did. 



CAMPAIGN ON THE HUDSON. I3 

Thus much for the, to me, memorable interview which I had 
the honour of holding with you. The interview ended (for all 
such exploits of manhood must have an end) in your placing me 
in arrest, and handing me over to Captain Watson, commandant 
of your headquarters-guard, who took me to your provost-guard 
prison, and put me in what he called a magazine-tent. This 
was a tent nearly filled with open boxes of powder and other 
explosive ammunition, or what seemed such, and among the 
rest a considerable heap of large shell, charged, so the Captain 
said, with Greek fire. There was little more than vacant room 
enough for me to lie down, and that was close beside the heap 
of shell. The Captain cautioned me not to allow a spark of 
fire in the tent, and especially not to disturb the shell, lest they 
should explode and blow me up. What may have been the 
motive of this warning I cannot say, but it had the effect of the 
most studied inhumanity : I could not help being in continual 
apprehension lest some unlucky step of mine should set the 
shell a-tumbling ; but I found out afterwards that they would 
bear much rougher handling than I had been led to suppose. 

I had never before heard of a magazine-tent being set up in 
any provost-guard prison. I presume the thing had been hit 
upon by you as a novel engine of torture for certain select vic- 
tims. It was indeed exquisitely adapted to that end, and was 
used with exquisite effect in my case. Yet I had been under 
fire, Sir, and had found myself able to face the dangers of 
battle with tolerable composure, these being to me mere child's 
play compared to the choice hell-craft with which you thus 
made merry at my expense. To have had me ironed, and set 
to work in your Dutch-Gap Canal, though, to be sure, it would 
have looked much worse, and could scarce have failed to draw 
upon you an immediate storm of reprobation, would have dis- 
tressed me nothing so much as this quiet little arrangement of 
yours for " punishing "me. Doubtless you perfectly understood 
all that. 

But I must do you the justice to say, that you soon repudi- 
ated, apparently, this child of your invention. The magazine- 



14 GENERAL BUTLER S 

tent, after I had occupied it two days, was taken down, and the 
ammunition removed entirely out of the inclosure. Whethei 
Captain Watson told me what he knew to be false, or whethei 
he was himself deceived, I could not tell ; but, from the way 
the men tossed and banged the shell about in the process of 
removal, it appeared that the Greek fire, if there was any in 
them, had gone too fast asleep to be waked up by any ordinary 
disturbance. Whether the open boxes of powder and other 
explosive ammunition were also bogus preparations for working 
out your schemes of torture, I had no means of ascertaining. 
I was, and I am, very glad. Sir, that you did not keep me any 
longer in that tent. Yet I am far from suspecting you of any 
humanity or kindness of heart, in ordering the change. 

When I remonstrated with Captain Watson against being 
confined in such a place of torment, he replied that such was 
your order ; that is, you ordered him to put me in a tent by 
myself, and that was the only tent where he could so put me. 
An average nose will readily smell out the meaning of this. 
For, of course, such astute tormentors and inquisitors as you 
do not commonly perpetrate their crimes and inhumanities 
without providing beforehand some plausible shifts for eluding 
the responsibility of their deeds. And so, I make no doubt, 
you will say, if you have not already said, that you did not 
order me to be put in that tent, nor even know I was put there. 
No ! you only knew that such an engine of torture stood ready 
in your prison-pen, and that there was no other unoccupied tent 
on the ground. This was enough ; your order would send me 
there, as a matter of course ; yet not so but that you could 
ignore the main point, and slip out, if challenged. For such, I 
have been well assured, is your habitual craft in managing to 
throw off upon your " agents and base second means " the 
scandal and blame of your practices. 

That such was your game in my case, appeared in that, as I 
afterwards learned, until my coming the magazine-tent had been 
most carefully guarded, no prisoner being allowed to look into 
it, or even to go up to it. I must add, that in cases like mine 



CAMPAIGN ON THE HUDSON. 1 5 

your orders are not issued through your adjutant-geneial's office, 
but go direct from you to those that are to execute them, so 
that no pubhc record is made of the proceedings. This method 
of course arms you, in effect, with full inquisitorial powers, and 
precludes any check or hindrance to the most tyrannical abuse 
of power. It scarce need be said, that in the running of this 
"infernal machine" you do not scruple to realize all the terri- 
ble oppressions of which the machine is capable. 

To resume my narrative : It was nearly dark when Captain 
Watson got me housed in the prison. The weather was more 
than cool ; the ground in the tent was so wet as to be almost 
muddy ; and there I was left without a rag of a blanket to put 
under me or over me, and with nothing to lie on but some 
barrel-staves spread out on the ground. I had told the Captain 
that I was somewhat out of health, and rather old for such 
hardships, and had asked him to procure me a blanket or two, 
offering to pay for them. He said he would try to do so; I 
waited, but no blanket came. x\t last, a corporal of the guard, 
a very civil, kind-hearted man, named Jones, managed to bor 
row me a single blanket, which I wrapped round my shoulders, 
and spent most of the night in walking to and fro over the 
square of ground in front of my tent, not being allowed to walk 
beyond it. Even at that I shivered through hour after hour till 
near morning, when the same gentle corporal took me out to 
the cook-house, and let me sit by the stove and warm myself. 
The corporal seemed fearful lest these deeds of charity should 
come to the knowledge of his officers. 

My trunk, containing all my baggage, I had been obliged to 
leave at the landing-place, some three fourths of a mile from 
your headquarters. Before going into the prison, I had found 
means of writing a note to Lieutenant Davenport, your Assistant 
Provost-Marshal, describing my trunk, telling him where it was, 
and requesting him to let me have it, as I greatly needed some 
of the articles in it. He sent me word the trunk should be 
brought to me ; I expected it, and was disappointed. Had I 
anticipated any such proceedings, I should have gone first 



1 6 GENERAL BUTLEr's 

among my old comrades, and engaged some of them to help 
me through. Bat I then supposed you to be very different 
from what you are. 

In the morning, a piece of boiled salt fish, a piece of bread 
rather stale, and a cup of coffee without sugar, were given me. 
The fish I could not eat, the coffee I could not drink, and so 
made my breakfast on bread and water ; wliich would have 
done very well, but that, through cold and want of sleep, and 
distress of mind, my stomach was so weak and disordered that 
I could not keep the food down. At that time, I was not 
allowed to speak with any but officers of the guard ; and these 
were all afraid to do any thing for me, or to let any thing be 
done ; inferring, as they well might, from the usage put upon 
me, either that I was some desperate criminal, or else that you 
had strong *' personal feelings " against me. Otherwise, I could 
easily have found ways to supply myself with food. Mean- 
while, as I have since learned, you and your creatures were 
doing what you could to defame and blacken me, hinting that I 
was a political offender, that I had been caught giving aid and 
comfort to the enemy, and I know not what other charges, all 
calculated to shut up the instincts of kindness in those about 
me. 

The second day I applied to Captain Watson again for some 
blankets, but was told there were none to be had. I also made 
another appeal to Lieutenant Davenport for my trunk, urging 
my needs still more earnestly, and he promised again that I 
should have it. Night came again ; my trunk was still kept 
from me ; the corporal had been obliged to return the borrowed 
blanket ; so that I was left without any thing. Rather late in the 
evening, I managed to get an interview with the Captain, told 
him my condition, and then addressed him thus : " Captain Wat- 
son, I have been under the command of Generals Hunter, 
Mitchel, and Gillmore, successively, in the Department of the 
South ; while there, I served for a considerable time as chaplain 
of the provost-guard quarters ; and I remonstrated more than 
once with the commanding general in behalf of rebel prisoners, 



CAMPAIGN ON THE HUDSON. 1 7 

who were treated much better than I am here. And I now 
pledge you my word, sir, that if our present relations should 
ever be reversed, I will not treat you as you are treating me." 
He replied, "But for your cloth, sir, I should hold myself bound 
to challenge you for that speech." I got no rehef from him, 
his orders probably not allowing him to give me any ; but a fel- 
low-prisoner, Captain Simpson, of a Pennsylvania battery, lent 
me a blanket and two narrow boards for the night, partly depriv- 
ing himself. 

On the third day, as I despaired of getting my trunk from 
Lieutenant Davenport, I addressed a note directly to you, tell- 
ing you how it was with me, and begging you to let me have 
my baggage, or at least some part of it, mentioning several arti- 
cles of which I was in great and pressing need. I was told soon 
after that you had given or would give orders to have my trunk 
brought me. A few hours later, instead of the trunk, came infor- 
mation that the trunk had disappeared, had probably been re- 
shipped down the river, and should be sent for back by the first 
opportunity. All this appeared to me rather significant. Was 
I uncharitable in concluding there had been no serious purpose 
of getting my baggage to me ? I know not whether Lieutenant 
Davenport is still with you. If he be, please make my compH- 
ments to him : tell him, from me, that if he did not respect me 
nor my needs, he ought at least to have respected his own word ; 
and that the man who does not respect his own word must ex- 
cuse me from respecting it. 

Such is, in brief, the history of my first three days with you. 
I can truly say that I would not have treated a dog of yours so ; 
no, not even if the dog had bit me. Meanwhile, my condition 
became known to some members of my own regiment, who 
were quartered near by. They went to work at once for my 
relief. I saw Captain Eaton, one of our very best officers, told 
him of my trunk ; he promised to look after it, and his promise 
was kept. He furnished me also with a bunk, a bench, and some 
blankets, and had me supplied with wholesome and palatable food 
from his own mess, till I could make arrangements for feeding my- 



l8 GENERAL BUTLER's 

self. My mattress and pillow too, which I had put under our Cap- 
tain Southard when he was brought into camp mortally wounded, 
and had left under him when I went North, with instructions 
that he should have them as long as he might need them, — 
these were found and returned to me. And in due time two of 
Captain Eaton's men came, bringing my trunk, and saying they 
had found it right where I left it, and no signs of its having been 
disturbed. My belief then was, and still is, that but for these 
friends I should not have seen my trunk agai i very soon. You, 
Sir, did not mean I should have it, so long any excuse or pre- 
text could be found or made for keeping it from me. Cap- 
tain Watson too, either from shame, or for some other cause, had 
another tent put up for me on dry ground. So that I was 
now pretty well supplied with what was needful for bodily com- 
fort. It is well worth remarking, further, that most of the officers 
and men of the guard laid aside much of their roughness toward 
me, on learning, as they soon did, that I was not the wild beast 
which your treatment inferred me to be. I owe it to them to 
say, that they became as civil and kindly to me as they dared to 
be. Nor must I omit that Chaplain Jarvis, of the First Con- 
necticut Heavy Artillery, hearing of the plight I was in, sought 
me out, and did me many kindnesses, often visiting me while I 
was in prison, and bringing not only material supplies, but the 
far dearer comforts of fraternal counsel and support. In the 
latter part of my confinement, Chaplain De Forest also, of the 
Eleventh Connecticut, was very attentive to me, and, though 
not nominally of the same house with me, was just as good as if 
he had been ; a true friend and brother indeed. 

Whenever I remonstrated with your subordinates for their 
harshness to me, they still pleaded that they were but execut- 
ing your orders, and that by doing otherwise they would only 
get themselves into trouble, without helping me. Moreover, 
you took good care to let them know that you were my per- 
sonal enemy ; and so they underrtood, of course, that in perse- 
cuting me they were sure of recommending themselves to you, 
however you might pretend to disown their acts. 



CAMPAIGN ON THE HUDSON. _ 1 9 

The event proved that your purpose respecting me was not 
substantially changed. I was held under the closest guard, 
not even being allowed to answer the calls of nature without 
an armed soldier standing over me ; whether to shield me from 
invasion, or to keep me from running away, I could not tell. 
I was also debarred free correspondence with family and 
friends, my letters being required to undergo revisal by your- 
self or your deputies. This was indeed a mean and cruel de- 
privation, and I felt it as such, having never before heard of 
its being done in case of an officer in arrest. I was told that 
any letters I might send in unsealed would either be forwarded 
to their address or returned to me ; but I now know that faith 
was not kept with me in that. And I was shut up in the same 
narrow inclosure, known as your " bull-pen," along with rebel 
prisoners, fugitives, and the offscourings of your army, — a 
most lousy, lewd, profane, and ribald set, whose speech was 
constantly teeming with stuff too bad for any civilized hearing. 
Their dialect, steeped as it was in filth and crime, might have 
been pleasing to you. Sir, for it was something like yours ; but 
it was not pleasing to me. Therewithal, I was in continual 
dread of catching from them the loathsome vermin ; in fact, it 
was not possible to avoid doing so. The thought of having my 
lean body thus made a pasture for Southern live-stock was 
indeed none of the pleasantest, but I digested it as I best 
could. And "the familiar beast to man " did not pick my old 
bones quite bare ; I still have a little flesh and some heart left, 
notwithstanding your mean and miserable oppressions. 

It hardly need be said that this whole thing was new and 
strange to me. I had seen many officers of the army in arrest, 
but I had never before known of any being subjected to such 
hardships and indignities as these. At the close of our inter- 
view, I asked you to let me go in arrest among my own 
regiment, and there be confined to my quarters ; as in all my 
ex])erience with the army had been the uniform custom in such 
cases. You refused. I made the same request again in my 
written statement to you. ' Still you refused. One would think 



20 GENERAL BUTLEr's 

my official character and infirm health might have won me that 
indulgence, even if it had not been customary. Without assert- 
ing any peculiar claims to consideration, I may justly ask why 
you thus excepted me from the honourable usages of the ser- 
vice ? Did you find any special motives to roughness in my 
gray hairs, my recent affliction, and my sacred office? What 
hindered you from granting my reasonable request? Nothing, 
evidently nothing, but the mean pleasure you felt in tormenting 
me, and in putting gratuitous and singular indignities upon me. 
You, Sir, were punishing me as a condemned man, yet I had 
not been tried. For, to officers, the provost-guard prison, even 
in its best form, is emphatically a place of punishment, and is 
never regarded as any thing else. You had, and you knew it, a 
strong personal animosity, a sort of idiomatic virulence, against 
me ; you said you meant to be just, though you scorned to be 
thought kind-hearted ; yet you did not scruple to speak as my 
accuser, to act as my judge in the very matter whereof you 
accused me, and then to punish me on your own judgment. 
Where was your respect for even the commonest decencies of 
justice in that? On putting me in arrest, you told me I was to 
be tried by my peers. To this I neither spoke nor felt any 
objections ; such a course would have been fair ; and I should 
have had no right to complain of it. For some time I hoped 
that so it would be. But I knew the law made it your duty to 
see that, within eight days after my arrest, a copy of the charges, 
whereon I was to be tried, should be served upon me. Many 
long, weary weeks passed, still no written charges appeared 
against me. Meanwhile, you kept me a close prisoner ; you 
victimized me with peculiar severities and dishonours ; you 
held me in a state of debasement unknown to the service : in 
short, as if anticipating a verdict of acquittal in case I should 
be tried, and as if determined to make sure of your revenge at 
all events, you spent all that time in" executing upon me the 
penalties which your own virulence had prompted. Such was 
your practical commentary on the lawless threat uttered during 
our interview : '' I have you in my power now, sir, and I am 



CAMPAIGN ON THE HUDSON. 21 

going to punish you." Yet you "mean to be just" ! You are 
indeed an original man. May your imitators be few ! Up to 
the time of our interview, I had sharply resented the Southern 
doctrine respecting you. Will any one blame me if I accept it 
now? 

To relieve the monotony of this review, I will here interpose 
a brief passage from another hand. On the 24th of September, 
I applied to you, in writing, for leave to hold religious services 
in the prison the next day ; Sunday, the 25th, being the day on 
which the President had requested to have special thanksgivings 
offered in the churches for the recent successes of the national 
arms. In the course of the day, the application came back to 
me with the following indorsement : 

" Respectfully Returned. — By military usage, an officer 
under arrest on charges cannot exercise any of the duties of his 
office. Such permission would be a virtual release from arrest. 
That your functions are of a high and sacred nature, should 
have made you more careful in getting under arrest for absence 
without leave ; the penalty of which is Reduction to the Ranks. 
(Signed) " Benj. F. Butler, 

" Major-General Commanding." 

I was aware, Sir, of the usage which you here enforced, as I 
also u'as of other usages which you so flagrantly disregarded in 
my case ; and I made the request, not in the character of a 
chaplain, but in that of a Christian minister. This was obvious 
on the face of it. I was not so green as to suppose myself the 
chaplain of your bull-pen. I was sorry afterwards that I did 
not hold the services without asking your leave, and then let 
you punish me if you would. Anxiety not to offend you was 
what caused me to do as I did. I confess your refusal grieved 
me ; I did not expect it. 

However, the thing had the effect of drawing some part of 
your fire. I now, for the first time, had authentic notice that 
I was " under arrest on charges for absence without leave." 
But I took notice of somewhat more than this : it was now 



22 GENERAL BUTLER S 

plain that you dared not allege any other reason for the un- 
lawful course you were taking with me. And I was perfectly 
sure you knew my absence without leave to be attended with 
such strong mitigations, that no fair-minded court-martial would 
convict me of a punishable offence in that matter. What, then, 
was it that you here came to me with in your right hand ? In- 
deed, General, you overshot yourself in that " pious effusion." 
From that time forward I understood the meaning of all you 
said about having me tried. 

I was now notified, further, that the penalty in my case was 
"reduction to the ranks"; and I understood you as threaten- 
ing me with that penalty. In this, it strikes me that you pre- 
varicated the law somewhat ; that is, you Butlerized it, or, 
which is the same thing, looked upon it asquint. The fourth 
Article of War reads thus : " Every chaplain commissioned in 
the army or armies of the United States, who shall absent him- 
self from the duties assigned him, (except in cases of sickness 
or leave of absence,) shall, on conviction thereof before a court- 
martial, be fined not exceeding one month's pay, besides the 
loss of his pay during his absence ; or be discharged, as the said 
court-martial shall judge proper." I am not ignorant. Sir, of 
the later Act of Congress, which provides that courts-martial 
shall have power to sentence officers to reduction to the ranks 
for absence without leave. But neither this Act nor any other 
prescribes that penalty for that offence. It is true, then, that re- 
duction to the ranks mayhe,h\y\. not true that it />, the penalty in 
cases like mine. But perhaps you meant that I was obnoxious 
to the penalty in question, not by the law, but by the exercise 
of arbitrary power in breaking the law. If so, you are welcome 
to all the truth there was in your unprincipled menace. I had 
no fear, though, of your executing that threat upon me. I saw 
it was a mere piece of make-believe, and therefore did not 
believe it. Be assured, Sir, that the obliquity and indirection 
fetched from your old haunts of pot-house litigation and politics 
will not stand the fire of military life. Your old " tricks of the 
trade," however they might pass with the " boys " who were 



CAMPAIGN ON THE HUDSON. 2$ 

wont to crowd your theatre for the fun of seeing you roast wit- 
nesses in foul cases, are out of place in the army. Notwith- 
standing your long practice as a moral Harlequin, your playing 
of the part is too raw and clumsy for any place but the ring ; 
let alone, that you have something to learn, and much to un- 
learn, before you will be fit for any but ring-men to know. 

I had been in prison four or five days, when Colonel Serrell 
came to me, and said he had been having a long talk with you 
about me. That you disclaimed all hard feelings towards me ; 
had no wish to injure me ; desired to save me from a court- 
martial. That you thought I had better write out for you a 
statement of my case, covering the main points which had come 
up in our interview ; as this might open the way for a settlement 
without a trial. That if a trial were had, it would be mainly 
with a view to bring out what I knew about General Gillmore ; 
and you advised me, in that case, to plead guilty to all the 
charges and specifications, as I would fare better by doing so 
than by attempting any defence. That, as for my absence with- 
out leave, you did not consider this, in the circumstances, any 
great offence ; while the fact of my having been all along a 
known and allowed correspondent of the Press left you little 
cause against me on that score. I was nothing at a loss, Sir, as 
to the meaning of all this. It was merely the old game of the 
accuser turning tempter. I saw the trap, however, too plainly 
to be greedy of the bait. 

The Colonel also instructed me that you had a perfect right, 
without a trial, to reduce me to the ranks for absence without 
leave ; and that, in fact, there was no law to restrain you from 
doing with me any thing you might choose. And he appeared 
stuck fast in the belief — perhaps you can tell who stuck him 
there — that, to use his own phrase, you " had got the whip- 
hand of everybody " ; insomuch that neither the Lieutenant- 
General, nor the Secretary of War, nor even the President, 
dared to thwart or oppose you in any thing. Such was the 
upshot of his counsel on that head. I well remember how, in 
answer to something that was said touching the President and 



24 GENERAL BUTLER S 

you, he spoke of "some men being made to see things through 
other men's eyes." Did not you plant some such wisdom in 
him, Sir? or was it the harvest of his own sagacity? Howbeit, 
the plain inference from all this was, that I stood entirely at 
your mercy ; that no man would dare to help me against you ; 
and that my only refuge from whatever punishments you might 
please to inflict was by satisfying you, and so making you my 
friend. 

The Colonel therefore advised — whether from you or from 
himself I cannot say — that my best way was '"'to come out" 
in my Statement, '' and make a clean breast of it " — those were 
his words — in regard to General Gillmore. This was indeed 
a rather pregnant hint that you were imputing to me some mys- 
terious knowledge about General Gillmore, which must needs 
foul my breast Avith guilt ; and that I had only to make you my 
father-confessor, and whisper myself out of your clutches by 
whispering another man in. Wasn't it lovely? 

I think, then, I was not far wrong in understanding the Colonel 
as conveying from you to me both an invitation and a threat : 
and invitation to gratify your malice against General Gillmore, 
which would engage you to stand my good friend ; a threat 
that, if I failed to do this, you would take measures for roasting 
the matter out of me. I assured the Colonel that you were im- 
puting to me some knowledge about General Gillmore which I 
really did not possess ; that I knew nothing whatever which 
would answer the purpose of criminating that gentleman ; and 
that I did not see how I could possibly make any statement 
that would satisfy you, as you evidently wanted something from 
me which I had not to give. " Do you mean, Colonel," said I, 
"that General Butler wants me to lie against Gillmore?" " O. 
no," was his reply ; " he only wants you to tell the truth." 
" But, Colonel, what you say looks very much as though his 
plan were to wring out of me such truth as he chooses to im- 
pute to me. And so, in old times, when the engines of torture 
were used, it was claimed to be done in order to make the vic- 
tims tell the truth." This touched his satirical vein, and he re- 



CAMPAIGN ON THE HUDSON. 2$ 

plied, "That, I think. Chaplain, was always done by zealous 
members of the true Church." " It may be so," said I ; "but 
then, you know. General Butler is a remarkably pious man." 

In all this business. Colonel Serrell was acting — whether 
consciously or blindly, I am not clear — as your decoy; the 
programme being, to scare or wheedle, to bully or bribe, to 
oppress or corrupt me into " bearing false witness against my 
neighbour." And you were pretending to believe that 1 had 
some great secrets locked up in my breast, which, if I could be 
induced to give them up, would bring General Gillmore fairly 
under your teeth. I say, you were pirtending ; for, as touching 
the matter you were in quest of, I had, in our interview, told 
you the truth, and you knew it ; my own word, General Gill- 
more's word, and all the likehhoods of the case converging to 
the same point. And, as I really had no secrets of the kind to 
give up, I had little hope of my Statement's working any thing 
for my relief. For, if General Gillmore had been using me 
against you, I was not aware of it ; and I was quite sure that, 
if he had meant thus to use me, he would not have been so 
shallow as to tell me of it. 

Nevertheless, I set about writing the Statement, taking care to 
make it as conciliating to you as I could without sinning against 
the truth. I sent it to you with much misgiving. For, to sat- 
isfy you was out of tlie question, — God shield me. Sir, from 
being base enough to catch at such a bait as you threw out to 
me ! — and there remained the alternative of being held in tor- 
ture by you indefinitely, in the hope of extorting something 
further from me. I knew — for indeed you made no secret of 
it — that you had two revenges, a greater and a less : I suspected 
that I was to be the victim of the one or the other ; that, if I 
could not be made an instrument of the greater, I was to be used 
as aliment of the less. As for General Gillmore, I now had 
it in full assurance that, " if you could catch him once upon the 
hip, you would feed fat the ancient grudge you bore him," for 
declining to father your military blunders. And so, in this snug 
arrangement of yours, any one with half an eye might see that 



2b GENERAL BUTLER S 

Gillmore was to be your real game, I your candle for hunting it ; 
and that, whether the game were caught or not, the candle was 
sure to be burned. 

In the mean time, my absence without leave was to be worked 
by you merely as a pretence to cover the deeper scheme in 
question. Was it not so ? You know it was, Sir, and you need 
not attempt to deny it. In our interview, you told me once that 
I lied : perhaps you thought so. Did you suppose that, if I had 
lied to offend you, I would much more lie to propitiate you? 
Nay, Sir ; if I ever hire myself to that branch of the Devil's ser- 
vice, it will be under a better tactician than you. You quack 
it for Satan too clumsily, you mechanize falsehood and prevari- 
cation much too coarsely, for my taste. Your style of knavery is 
too untempered, too exultant, too immodest, to please me. If you 
take this as my reason for preferring General Gillmore to you, I 
care not ; and, my word for it, he will care as little as I. This 
by the way. As for any legal adjudication of my case, I now gave 
up all hope of it. The plain truth was, and is, that you dared not 
trust your cause to the judgment of a court-martial ; and all 
your talk about having me tried was a mere pretext for keeping 
me in your bull-pen, and so " punishing " me without a trial. For 
it soon became evident, that military law and usage were nothing 
to you, save as you could make them tell against others. The 
case, I own, seemed to me rather hard ; but I knew that so it is 
apt to be in this world, " when evil men are strong." 

Before sending my Statement to you, I made a true and per- 
fect copy of it, which I put into the hands of a tried and faithful 
friend, together with a note expressing my apprehensions as to 
the result. I also directed that, in certain contingencies, both 
the copy and the note should be sent to a particular address in 
New- York, to be used by my friends there as they might judge 
best for my defence and protection. In due time, they were 
so sent and so used, though not used with any decisive effect, 
till after much bitter proof had come to me, that in taking such 
precautions I had acted well. The last I heard of the said copy, 
it had been left in the hands of the Secretary of War. As to the 



CAMPAIGN ON THE HUDSON. 2/ 

bearing of my Statement in respect of General Gillmore, are you 
aware what it was, Sir ? You tried to roast out of me a crimina- 
tion of that officer. I gave you — what do you think, Sir? — I 
gave you a vindication of him. Bless you, General ! I did not 
mean it ; I never once thought of such a thing : I only meant 
to tell the simple truth ; and such, as I have cause to know, was 
the effect of the simple truth in that case. 

My apprehensions proved but too well grounded. Week 
after week passed away, still no charges were made against me. 
Meanwhile Colonel Serrell wrote me several notes, showing a 
lively interest in my behalf, inquiring whether any progress had 
been made in my case, and saying you had promised to take it 
up and dispose of it. I know not whether you were sincere in 
those promises ; but I know that they were not kept, and that 
the only effect of them was, to press home upon me that expe- 
rience of hope deferred which maketh the heart sick. And I 
think it hardly worth the while to speak of sincerity when any 
act of yours is in question ; for there is no truth in you. Sir, nor 
any thing to build a trust upon. Probably I did not at the time 
rightly divine the purpose of those friendly notes. I am now 
of the opinion that they were meant 2iS feelers, in order to as- 
certain whether I was yet ready to give up those wicked secrets 
which you imputed to me. 

At this time, I remained in your old bull-pen, where the 
number of prisoners had been gradually reduced to a few, and 
those pretty decent men. But an order now came for removing 
us up to your new bull-pen, some six miles distant. In the act 
of removal, I was obliged, lame and feeble and faint as I was, 
to foot it all the way ; the officer in command utterly refusing 
to let me ride, though there was room in the wagon for half-a- 
dozen men, and alleging that his orders would not allow it. 

Your old bull-pen was, in all conscience, bad enough, but the 
new one proved, as I anticipated, far worse ; the inclosure 
being much smaller, and crowded with men of the worst de- 
scription ; the ground, too, being so level, that it was impossi- 
ble to keep my quarters from being flooded whenever there was 



28 GENERAL BUTLER's 

any considerable fall of rain ; there being no roof but the sky, nor 
any floor but the bare earth. Therewithal it was an uncleaned 
horse-yard, the beasts having lately been removed, to make 
room for us men ; such a place, in fact, as, at that season, no 
good farmer would think of keeping his cattle in. True, it was 
within a stone's throw of your own quarters ; aiKl so is a man's 
pig-pen commonly within a stone's throw of his house. It was 
inhuman in you. Sir, to keep any thing wearing the human form 
in that nasty hole. Vile and stupid as many of them were, I 
pitied, with all my heart I pitied the poor creatures there hud- 
dled together, wading and wallowing in the mud and filth from 
which they could not escape. Physically, most of them were 
in a worse plight than myself, though probably none of them 
felt it as I did, there being no personal malice or vindictiveness, 
and therefore no sense of it, in their case. Besides, the others 
were, for the most part, confined only for a short time, few of 
them staying more than a week ; whereas I was kept from week 
to week, and even from month to month. I remember but two 
or three who were held through the whole period of my confine- 
ment ; and these were young men, healthy, vigorous, and more 
or less inured to similar hardships and exposures ; all which wis 
not true in my case, and you. Sir, knew it was not. At length, 
on the 6th of November, you being then in New- York, all the 
prisoners but myself were taken out of that loathsome inclosure, 
and removed to Bermuda Hundred. It was an act of great 
kindness in Colonel Smith, your Assistant Adjutant-General, to 
except me from that removal ; as the others were now placed in 
a condition still worse, some fifty being, as I afterwards learned, 
cooped up in a room not more than eighteen feet square. 

Such, General, is the honest story of your dealings with me. 
And, however you may " with unbashful forehead " braze it out, 
I found no small satisfaction in the assurance, which was not 
wanting, that your treatment of me, so far as it was known in 
the army, was regarded as " an outrage." For every step of 
your proceedings in my case was in direct and palpable viola- 
tion of the law. The 77th Article of War prescribes that, 



CAMPAIGN ON THE HUDSON. 29 

" Whenever any officer shall bo charged with a crime, he shall 
be arrested, and confined in his barracks, quarters, or tent." 
You confined me in your provost-guard prison, a place such as 
I have described it to be. The 79th Article of War declares, 
"No officer or soldier, who shall be put in arrest, shall continue 
in confinement more than eight days, or until such time as a 
court-martial can be assembled." You kept me in close prison 
fifty-three days. 

Thus it soon appeared that you cared nothing for the law as 
contained in the Articles of War ; or rather, that your malice 
against me was to you a higher law than those Articles, which, 
be it observed, we all have to subscribe on entering the service. 
And yet one of the first paragraphs in the Army Regulations 
declares, " Punishments shall be strictly conformable to military 
law." Nevertheless, I still hoped for some time, that you 
would respect the recent Act of Congress, which was passed' 
with a special view to cases like mine, and which made it un- 
lawful for you to keep me in arrest more than forty-eight days. 
The forty-eight days were passed, still I heard of no release. 
So, it was clear that even the solemn enactments of the highest 
law-making power in the land had no strength or virtue to res- 
cue me from your strange unbenevolence. 

You, Sir, had no right to put me in the provost-guard prison 
at all ; no right to keep me in close confinement anywhere 
more than eight days ; no right to hold me in any sort of arrest 
more than forty-eight days ; that is, you had just as much right 
to shoot, or hang, or starve me to death, as to do what you did. 
Every provision of law bearing on ray case was broken by you. 
And as week after week passed away, it became more and more 
evident that I had nothing to hope for in the shape of legal 
protection. For I had been expressly told, that any appeal to the 
law, any word of remonstrance, any movement for legal remedy 
or redress, would only be construed by you as a fresh offence, 
and visited with a further se\erity. Such was your scheme of 
"justice." You, Sir, were simply rioting in the abuse of mili- 
tary power, spurning alike at the restraints of law and the 



30 GENERAL BUTLER S 

usages of humanity. I never imagined before what it is for an 
honest man to find himself stripped of all legal protection, and 
held in the condition of an outlaw. Indeed, Sir, no language 
of mine can fairly express how much I suffered during those 
long, dreary, dismal weeks spent in }-our bull-pen ; though far 
less, to be sure, in the way of physical discomfort, than of men- 
tal distress. May God defend you and yours, Sir, from ever 
suffering what I suffered there, under your hard-hearted and un- 
lawful inflictions ! I seemed to be left alone and helpless in 
the hands of a most unfeeling and vindictive man ; that man 
had discovered himself my personal enemy ; he was armed 
with military power ; he was capable of any outrage ; there 
was no sense of honour, no grace of manhood in him ; to be 
mean was his pride, to be brutal his pleasure ; he was revelling 
in the license of assumed impunity ; he allowed no law, nor 
any thing else, to stand between me and his malice. But, much 
as I suffered from you, and bitter as is the remembrance of 
your inflictions, I shall not regret them, nay, I shall take com- 
fort of them, provided your brutal savageness, as exercised on 
me, should work something towards inducing the country to 
scour you out of her honourable service. 

It may be well to cite, here, an instance or two as showing 
what a "just man " you are, to make one law for yourself, and 
another for those in your power. In the course of our inter- 
view, you demanded to see General Gillmore's order sending 
me to New-York on special duty. On my handing it to you, 
you said it was an illegal order, and I had no right to obey it. 
I assured you that I was ignorant of that, and had never so 
much as suspected it ; whereupon you gave me to understand 
that such ignorance would have no force to save me from pun- 
ishment. This, no doubt, was what you meant by the charge 
of being *' absent without proper authority." Some time after 
my release, I asked Captain Watson whether he was aware tha'. 
he had been executing illegal orders on me. O, yes ! he knew 
it perfectly, he said. I then told him that I had your authority 
for saying he had no right to obey those orders, and quoted 



CAMPAIGN ON THE HUDSON. 3 1 

what you had said in reference to General Gilh-nore's order to 
me. He replied that he could not help himself, and he would 
like to see the officer under you that should dare to question 
the legality of your orders. " But," said I, ''you might at least 
protest against executing orders which you know to be illegal." 
Yes, he could do that, he said, but it would only get him into 
the bull-pen. I have since learned from the worthy Captain, 
that he never had any written order in my case, and that he 
acted all the while under the oral orders of your immediate 
subaltern. So ! here was another of the Articles of War vio- 
lated every day that I was kept in prison. But what boots it to 
speak of those Articles in connection with you ? as if your law- 
less spirit would condescend to know them, save as you might 
find your pleasure or your pride in breaking them. For it is 
notorious throughout the army, that your action respects the 
law as little as your speech does the truth ; which reminds me 
of what I have heard as coming from one of our distinguished 
generals, who knows you well : " No man who respects himself 
will think it worth his while to contradict any thing that General 
Butler may say." But I trust, nay, I am sure, it is not in the 
heart or the head of our Government to sanction or even to 
tolerate such demoralizing practices in the high places of the 
military service. 

During your absence in New- York, General Terry, as the 
ranking officer under you, was left in command. Not know- 
ing how far his authority might reach, but knowing him to be 
as unlike you in humanity as in soldiership, I wrote to his 
headquarters as follows : 

" Provost-Guard Prison, Headquarters 

Department Va. and N.C, Nov. 8, 1864. 

" To Captain Adrian Terry, A, A. General, d^c. : 

" Captain : I have now been under arrest, and kept a close 
prisoner in the provost-guard prison, 7$//)' days. My imprison- 
ment has been attended with very extraordinary circumstances 
of hardship and indignity. Soon after my arrest, I learned 



32 GENERAL BUTLER S 

from General Butler that I was * under arrest on charges for 
absence without leave ' ; still no charges have in legal form 
been brought against me. 

" The law is very clear and positive that, in case of any offi- 
cer thus under arrest, the arrest shall cease at the end oi forty- 
eight days. As an officer of the army, I believe I have the 
right to know, and I hereby respectfully ask to be informed, 
for what reasons, and by what authority, the law is thus vio- 
lated in my case. 

" Whatever be the answer to this question, I claim the pro- 
tection of the law, and solemnly protest against this infraction 
of it. Respectfully yours, &c., 

"H. N. Hudson, 
" Chaplain First N. Y. Vol. Engineers." 

After waiting two days, and getting no reply to this, I wrote 
to the same headquarters again : 

"Guard-House, General Butler's 
Headquarters in the Field, Nov. io, 1864. 

" To Lieutenant IV. P. Shreeve, A, A. A. General, 6^^. .• 

" Lieutenant : On the 19th of September, I was put in ar- 
rest by General Butler, and handed over to the custody of his 
headquarters-guard. From that time till the 8th inst., I was 
kept shut up in his * bull-pen ' along with rebel prisoners, 
fugitives, and the lowest criminals of our arm}^, their bodies 
infested with Hce, their tongues with the most disgusting lewd- 
ness and profanity, such as, without very strong reason, no 
Christian man ought to be forced to hear. During the latter 
part of the time, the * bull-pen ' aforesaid was too bad a place 
for any human beings to be shut up in, having lately been used 
as a horse-stand, and the ground being covered with the refuse 
of its former occupants. I have been subjected to the horrors 
and sufferings of this dreadful place, without a trial or a hear- 
ing. My health is suffering seriously from the hardships and 
exposures thus forced upon me. 



CAMPAIGN ON THE HUDSON. 33 

"On the 8th inst., I was taken out of the 'bull-pen,' and put 
into the guard-house, where I am still kept along with a par- 
cel of soldiers who spend a good deal of the time in gambling, 
and nearly all of it in frightful cursing and swearing. I have 
no privacy at all ; and such is the noise about me that I can 
hardly get any sleep ; the terrible shocks and strains which I 
have lately undergone, having rendered me so weak and nerv- 
ous, that I need quietness for that indispensable process of 
nature. 

" I have now been held a close prisoner, and in the endur- 
ance of this punishment. Jiffy-two days ; whereas the Act of 
Congress approved July 17th, 1862, clearly and expressly pro- 
vides that, in case of any officer thus put under arrest, the 
arrest shall terminate and cease at the end of forty-eight 
days. 

" I believe it is my right, therefore, to demand, and I hereby 
respectfully do demand, to be released from arrest ; and I sol- 
emnly warn the military authorities in command to beware how 
they persist in thus punishing me, against the law, without a 
trial or a hearing, and to my great and manifest injury. I am 
willing and ready, as I have been ever since my arrest, to give 
my parole of honour to obey strictly all lawful orders, and to 
answer to any charges that are or may be made against me in 
due form and process of law. 

" I herewith enclose a document which will give you all the 
information that I have, as to the cause of my arrest and pun- 
ishment. You will see that the document should be carefully 
preserved and restored to me. 

" Respectfully yours, &c., 

" H. N. Hudson, 
" Chaplain First N. Y. Vol. Engineers." 

The " document " here referred to was your reply, already 
quoted, to my application for leave to hold religious services in 
the prison. Late in the evening of the same day, I received the 
following : 



34 GENERAL BUTLER S 

"Headquarters Army of the James, 

Before Richmond, Va., Nov. id, 1864 

" Rev. H. N. Hudson, N. V. Vol. Engineers : 

" Sir : The Brevet Major-General commanding desires me to 
acknowledge the reception of your letter relative to your release 
from arrest, and to inform you in reply that he has no power to 
act in the premises. He is not in command of the Department, 
nor even of the whole military force within it ; he is simply in 
temporary command of the troops in the field. General Butler 
is still in command of the Department, although temporarily 
absent from it, and is still General Terry's commanding officer. 
Your arrest was made by the order of General Butler as com- 
manding officer of the Department ; and it would be manifestly 
improper for General Terry, or any one not acting as Depart- 
ment commander, to give any orders in relation to it. 

" I am directed also to say, that as soon as Major-General 
Butler returns your communication shall be laid before him. 

" I have the honour to be, sir, very respectfully, your obedi- 
ent servant, 

(Signed) "Adrian Terry, 

" Captain and A. A. General, &c." 

I found no fault with the course taken by General Terry ; 
indeed it was plain enough that he could not do more than he 
did. But I had gained this advantage, that some parts of my 
case were now brought to his knowledge ; and, as I had known 
him pretty well during nearly my whole term of seryice, I could 
have no doubt of his good disposition towards me. 

Meanwhile certain forces were brought to bear upon you in 
New-York. Perhaps you found cause to suspect that the pros- 
titution of your public authority to the work of personal ven- 
geance was not exactly what the Government wanted of you. 
Be that as it may, you wrote instructions to General Terry as 
follows : 



CAMPAIGN ON THE HUDSON. 35 

" Will General Terry, commanding Army of the James, give 
the following special order? 

"Headquarters Army of the James, 
Nov. 8, 1864. 
" Special Order No. — . 

" Chaplain Henry N. Hudson, having remained under arrest 
for some time, because of the impossibility of convening a court- 
martial to try him, because of movements in the field, is released 
from close arrest, and will report to his regiment for duty ; but 
will upon no pretence leave it."* 

What sort of an honest man were you. Sir, when you wrote 
that ? You alleged " the impossibility of convening a court- 
martial to try " me, as your reason for having held me in arrest 
nearly two months. You had held me all that time, not only in 
arrest, but in close prison ; for which, as you well knew, the 
reason alleged was, in law, just no reason at all. But let that 
pass. Notwithstanding your " impossibility," you had, during a 
large part of that very time, a court-martial in session at your 
headquarters in the field ; and, as I happen to know, case after 
case was tried by it, of persons whose arrest was subsequent to 
mine. That is, you here alleged what you could not but know 
to be false ; but then you alleged it for the present satisfaction 
of those who, as you also knew, could not contradict it. Again : 
On the 24th of September you could not let me hold religious 
services in the prison, because leave to do any official act would 
be "a virtual release from arrest." Now, you ordered me on 
official duty, and still kept me in arrest, though not in " close 
arrest." 

You sent a copy of tlie forecited instructions to a friend of 
mine in New-York, appending thereto a curious note, which I 
must reproduce : 

* After being discharged from the army, I spent a few weeks in New-York 
City, and there learned directly from Major General Dix, that General Butler, 
while in military command in that City, received an order from President 
Lincoln to let me out of prison. 



36 GENERAL BUTLER's 

"Nov. 8, 1864 
" Stephen P. Nash, Esq. : 

" Dear Sir : Above you will find copy of order to be issued 
in the case of Chaplain Hudson. I believe that I am treating 
him differently from what I should do to another officer, because 
I fear lest personal feelings should warp my judgment. 

(Signed) " Yours, Benj. F. Butler." - 

I was right glad to learn that you were sensible you had " per- 
sonal feelings." I had been sensible of it a good while, I can 
tell you. Some thought this little effusion rather dark. To me 
it seemed clear enough. You meant, of course, that if you had 
been my personal friend, you would have treated me still worse ; 
that is, you acknowledged malice, and then alleged that very 
malice as your motive to special leniency. Is it possible you 
could suppose that so shallow and shameless a pretext would 
serve ? 

General Terry's order, issued in pursuance of your instruc- 
tions, reached me on the nth of November. Though still, 
apparently, under some sort of arrest, nobody could tell what, 
I was now free to go among my old comrades ; free, also, to 
write as I pleased to family and friends. I remained a sort of 
prisoner in our camp till the 14th of December, when I re- 
ceived an order to report in person at the headquarters of the 
Lieutenant-General ; and, on doing so, I found that the Lieu- 
tenant-General had just been informed of my case by some 
friends of his in Washington. The day of my full deliverance 
had come at last. You were the'n off on your Fort Fisher expe- 
dition : what you would have done, had you been at your head- 
quarters in the field, I cannot tell. Nor did I greatly concern 
myself as to what you might do on your return ; for I was now 
under the protection of a Soldier and a Gentleman, who was 
also your official superior, and who, as I well knew, had before 
rescued officers from your tyrannical and lawless proceedings.* 

* General Grant immediately gave me leave of absence for a month ; which 
time was spent by me partly with my family in Northampton, Mass., partly 
in Boston, and partly in the City of New-York. I was at the latter place on the 
^th of January, 1865, the date given at the head of this paper. 



CAMPAIGN ON THE HUDSON. 37 

On the 7th of November, you promised my friends in New- 
York that you would " have me tried very soon." You had no 
such purpose, Sir. And, as you manifestly had little cause 
against me, you encouraged them in the belief " that your object 
was, to make the testimony, which you hoped to elicit in my 
trial, bear against General Gillmore." Pshaw, Sir ! you knew 
well enoucjh that such a process would be far more apt to bring 
out matter against yourself than against him. But your prom- 
ise was thoroughly falsified in that seven weeks more passed, 
still I heard of no charges against me, nor any thing done in 
preparation for my trial. Where had you been such a spend- 
thrift of truth, Sir, as to become thus bankrupt of that treasure ? 
When Colonel Serrell came to me from you, he told me that 
you dared not trust yourself to appoint the court and revise the 
sentence in my case, because you were conscious of certain 
infirmities that might sway you from the line of strict impartial- 
ity ; and therefore you proposed referring that matter to the 
President or the Lieutenant-General. Of course this was said 
in order to make me believe that, from a peculiar sensitiveness 
of virtue, you would voluntarily waive your legal right in the 
premises, and invoke the action of your military superior; 
whereas, in fact, you, as the prosecutor in my case, were ex- 
pressly restrained by law from acting in the matter, and tied to 
the very course which you so piously proposed to take. More 
than three months have passed since my arrest, and still, so far 
from invoking the action of your military superior, you have not 
even broached the subject to him.* 

Before quitting this part of the subject, I must relate a little 
incident as illustrating rarely well the spirit which animated 
you and your sequels, throughout this business. The second 
day of my confinement, while I was yet in the magazine-tent, I 
^\Tote a brief note in pencil to General Terry, telling him I was 
there " sick and in prison," with no one to help me or counsel 
me, and begging the favour of a few moments' interview. I 

* See Appendix, A. and C. 



38 GENERAL BUTLER's 

sent the note, open, to the officer in charge, under the promise 
that any thing so sent should either go to the address or be re- 
turned. The note did not come back, nor did I hear from the 
General. A few days later, when Colonel Serrell came to see 
me, I spoke of this note, and asked if he knew whether it had 
gone as directed. He told me General Terry had received it ; 
that he had himself talked with the General about it, who said 
he could do nothing for me, and had no time to see me. I 
thought this was not like General Terry ; and it seemed right 
hard that, in my distress, he should thus give me the cold 
shoulder ; for I had but requested an act of charity, and this, 
too, in a form which no Christian gentleman, such as I knew him 
to be, could well resist. His answer, as reported, hurt me 
much ; however, I swallowed my grief as well as I could. Some 
weeks after you let me out of prison, I saw General Terry, and 
inquired about that note. The thing was now explained : he 
never saw the note, and knew nothing of it. He did, indeed, see 
the Colonel, who told him I was in arrest, but left him to sup- 
pose me in arrest merely according to law and the settled usage 
of the army in such cases ; and he had no knowledge of my 
real condition till after you went to New- York. 

Well, General, the sum of the whole matter warrants, I 
think, a pretty grave charge against you. As I have already 
said, you were my accuser and my personal enemy ; I under- 
stand you as having admitted the personal enmity in your 
forecited note to my friend Mr. Nash. As a lawyer, you 
could scarcely be ignorant of the great legal maxim, that " No 
man is a good judge in his own case." Yet you presumed to 
act as my judge ; and then, on your own judgment, without 
a trial or a hearing, you dared to punish me with very great 
severity for nearly two months ; singling me out and excepting 
me from the protection of the law, and from the honourable 
usages of the service ; subjecting me to the most degrading 
conditions and associations ; utterly ignoring my military rank, 
my sacred office, my good name, my faithful service, my years, 
my ill-health, and my recent affliction ; treating me, in fact, 



CAMPAIGN ON THE HUDSON. 39 

as an outlaw, and as having no rights which you were bound 
to respect. All this, I affirm, was done by you mainly with 
the intent to distress and wring me into " bearing false witness 
against my neighbour." Moreover, to enforce this wrong upon 
me, you took a mean advantage of the military power with 
which the Government had clothed you, thus perverting a 
solemn public trust to the ends of private malice. Such, Sir, 
is my charge. You will meet it as you can. 

But I have not done with you yet. The foregoing matter 
contains several allusions which, as they stand, are a little ob- 
scure ; so that I must add something further, to clear them up. 
Moreover, one of your motives for wishing to keep me in your 
clutches was, you knew right well that I had full and authen 
tic knowledge of certain facts, which facts you desired by all 
means to suppress. As I now have you on trial, the occasion 
must be used for bringing out those facts. 

Last May, soon after landing with your army at Bermuda 
Hundred, you got possession of the railroad between Richmond 
and Petersburgh, and held it, I think, something over a week. 
During that time, you might have taken up a position com- 
manding the road, fortified, and made sure of it beyond all 
reasonable peradventure. This was the wise thing for you to 
do ; but you preferred, apparently, to be doing something 
more noisy and brilliant. For a Avhile, your movement was 
successful ; success, I take it, elated you somewhat ; and in 
your elation you saw some things that were not, and failed 
to see some things that were. Witness, your unlucky dispatch 
to the Lieutenant-General, assuring him that you had effectu- 
ally cut off Beauregard from reinforcing Lee. For you must 
know, Sir, that giddiness is no good strengthener of the vision 
for the seeing of facts as they a7'e ; and that to see facts as 
they are is of all things the most needful in a commanding 
general. 

Now, I understood at the time, or thought I understood, the 
importance of holding that railroad. On the i6th of May you 



40 GENERAL BUTLER's 

lost control of the road, lost it beyond recovery ; and this, too, 
by what I could not choose but regard as one of the greatest 
and most inexcusable blunders of the whole war. Indeed, Sir, 
it was a dreadful miscarriage, and the nation has paid dearly 
for it since, both in blood and treasure ; five hundred miUions 
of dollars and a hundred thousand lives being, probably, but a 
moderate estimate of the cost thus entailed through the wrong- 
headed, vain-glorious conceit and egotism of a general who was 
no soldier, overbearing the counsels of a sober and judicious 
soldiership. I was certainly led to believe at the time, and did 
believe, as indeed I still do, that if the advice of Generals 
Smith and Gillmore had been followed, the result would have 
been very different. I deplored the miscarriage much : I 
thought we had had enough of civilian commanders in the 
field : I longed, more than I know how to express, to have our 
military work go on in the conduct of educated soldiers, instead 
of sworded lawyers. Still I knew right well that in all human 
affairs, but especially in war, the best men are liable to make 
mistakes ; that such mistakes may draw on very serious conse- 
quences ; and that wise men, instead of brooding past mistakes, 
rather make it a point to remember them only that they may 
learn how to go on and do better. 

With these thoughts pressing upon me, I wrote the letter to 
Mr. Godwin, setting forth the fact and the circumstances of the 
miscarriage, as I understood them. The letter, against my ex- 
pectations, was published. I was, and 1 still am, well assured, 
that the letter, though erroneous in some of the details, was in 
its main points substantially true. But you, I suppose, were 
ambitious to be distinguished as a great general, perhaps as the 
greatest of all our generals. To have achieved the capture of 
Richmond, would have gone far towards making that distinc- 
tion yours. I impute not such ambition to you as a fault ; or) 
the contrary, I should regard it as a high virtue in you, pro- 
vided you used none but just and honourable means to compass 
your object. But it was obvious enough that the recent mis- 
carriage would operate as a material drawback on your ambition 



CAMPAIGN ON THE HUDSON. 4 1 

of military renown, in case it should' become generally known to 
the public. And, through the letter aforesaid, I became, unde- 
signedly, a means of making it thus known. This, Sir, and 
nothing but this, was the true motive, the real secret, of your 
unbenevolent proceedings against me ; you knew it was, and 
you knew, moreover, that I knew it was. Indeed you evidently 
wished me to understand that such was the case, and to suppose 
that my only chance of escaping your clutches was by arming 
you with something wherewith to twist General Gillmore. So 
that I feel amply warranted to say, that your treatment of me 
was not for any purpose of military order and discipline, but to 
the end either of taking vengeance directly on me, or else of in- 
ducing me to serve as your instrument of vengeance on another. 
Whether you acted, also, with the further view of making an 
example of me as a newspaper correspondent, to the end of re- 
ducing other newspaper correspondents to a course of entire 
subserviency to yourself, that so you might have them to offi- 
ciate, unreservedly, as your advocates and puffers in the public 
ear, I pretend not to say. But this I know full well, that cor- 
respondents who did what they could to discredit major-generals 
under you were not put in your bull-pen. 

At our interview, you tried to make me say that General Gill- 
more gave me the matter of my letter to Mr. Godwin. This I 
could not say, because it was not true. I told you that General 
Gillmore did not give me any of that matter; that he knew 
nothing of the letter, and I had no speech with him on the sub- 
ject of it, till after it was written and mailed. I told you the 
same again in my written Statement. I now affirm it to you 
once more. And the same, in effect, as I now know, had been 
told you twice by the General himself, in the official corres- 
pondence that passed between you and him soon after the 
letter was published. On your demanding who then did give 
me the matter, I told you it was given me by Colonel Serrell and 
other officers of our regiment. I did this with reluctance, but 
you were pushing me hard, and browbeating me savagely. I 
now tell you, further, that the whole of that matter — every 



42 GENERAL BUTLER S 

word, every particle, except my own reflections — was given me 
by the Colonel himself; though some parts of what he told me 
were more or less confirmed by other of our officers. 

The truth of the affair, as far as I can now recollect it, is just 
this : 

On Tuesday, the i yth of May, Colonel Serrell gave me a long 
account of what had taken place up at the front during tlie 
three or four days preceding. He did this voluntarily, and, as 
I thought, in the expectation or hope that I would use the mat- 
ter in my newspaper correspondence ; for he had often given 
me matter to be used in that way. Several of our officers then 
in camp were personally knowing to the fact of the Colonel's 
giving me the matter in question ; and they also understood 
just as I did his purpose in doing so. On the strength of what 
he thus told me, I wrote the letter to Mr. Godwin, which, I 
think, was dated the i8th, though, possibly, a day or two later. 
In the morning of Saturday, the 21st, after the letter had gone, 
I went to the Corps Headquarters, called on General Gillmore, 
and said, " General, I want to ask you one question ; if it is an 
hnproper one, you will know it to be so, and will treat it ac- 
cordingly." He said he would hear the question. I then 
asked him, " Did you, after capturing the enemy's line of works 
up near Drury's Bluff, send Colonel Serrell to General Butler, 
with a proposal to fortify your position there?" "Yes, I did," 
said he : '' the works needed a little engineering, so as to face 
the other way." I replied, " That is all. General ; I ask no 
more ; for I do not think it fair that I should be pumping mat- 
ter out of you." This, to the best of my recollection, was the 
first speech I had with General Gillmore after he left Hilton 
Head, and the only speech I had with him till after the letter to 
Mr. Godwin was published. 

While General Mitchel was in the Department of the South, 
on consultation with him I wrote a private letter to Mr. Horace 
Greeley, with whom I had been slightly acquainted several years. 
Mr. Greeley politely responded, requesting to hear from me oc- 
casionally. I therefore now wrote him a letter also, the same 



CAMPAIGN ON THE HUDSON. 43 

in substance as that to Mr. Godwin. I think this was written 
after the forecited talk with General Gillmore ; and, if so, I may 
have stated that the main point of it had been substantially con- 
firmed to me by him. 

This, General, is the whole and simple truth of that proceed- 
ing, as far as I now remember it. As Colonel Serrell was my 
informant, I trust you will allow that the contents of my letter 
to Mr. Godwin were " derived from an authentic source." 

After capturing the enemy's line of works near Drury's Bluff, 
which, I think, was done on Saturday the 14th of May, General 
Gillmore sent Colonel Serrell to you, with oral instructions to lay 
before you a plan for shortening the line and facing it towards 
Richmond ; because the works, having been constructed for 
defences against us, obviously needed certain changes in order 
to make them available as defences against the enemy. The 
General also sent you at the same time, and by the same hand, 
a written message to this effect : That, in case the enemy should 
seriously threaten his left, he had not force enough there to oc- 
cupy the whole of the captured line ; and that, if the extreme 
left were not occupied, it would be necessary to withdraw be- 
yond range of that position. On receiving the message, you 
gave this answer : " Say to General Gillmore, we are on the 
offensive, not defensive ; he need have no apprehension about 
his left " ; an answer so absurd and infatuate, that I am at a los? 
how to account for it, but upon the supposal of your having 
been specially inspired to utter it. Howbeit, the Colonel there- 
upon returned and reported your wisdom to General Gillmore 
in the hearing of several officers. I think you will hardly ven- 
ture to deny that this is a fair and truthful statement of the 
matter in hand. I leave it to you to settle with the country and 
with yourself for the strange and dreadful infatuation of your 
answer to General Gillmore's timely and judicious proposal. 
Would to God you had met that proposal as wisely as it was 
made ! 

Early in the morning of the following Monday, — do you not 
remember it, Sir? — you found the case somewhat altered ; you 



44 GENERAL BUTLER S 

were suddenly put on the defensive ; and I suspect it then be- 
came apparent to you, though not till too late, how potcnit and 
how prolific was the unwisdom of your forecited answer. " Short, 
sharp, and decisive," as your own saucy smartness, was the dis- 
comfiture which then swept over you. For your own sake, I 
would fain hope that the events of that morning may have chas- 
tised some of the airish, braggart self-importance out of you, 
and reduced your conceit nearer to the level of your capacity. 

While the fight was in progress, you sent, in rapid succession, 
first, two oral orders, and then at least three written ones, to 
General Gillmore, to leave his position within the enemy's line, 
and fall back. The first oral order was carried by General 
Martindale ; the second by an officer of your staff whose name 
I do not remember. On receiving the first. General Gillmore 
went forthwith to making preparations for doing as you ordered. 
This necessarily occupied some time, for the enemy was press- 
ing him in considerable force, so that he could not move at 
once without incurring serious loss. Your last wriffen order 
was very peremptory, commanding him to withdraw immediately. 
By that lime his dispositions were completed, and he withdrew 
in good order, bringing off nearly all his wounded, and also most 
of his material. 

After falling back some half or three-fourths of a mile, General 
Gillmore took up a good position, and there paused, to cover 
your retreat. There you came upon him, and called him to 
account for what he had done. He produced your written 
orders. These of course you could not deny. But you alleged 
that he had begun his arrangements for falling back before 
he received either of those orders. He admitted this, but cited 
your oral orders as his reasons for doing so. You thereupon 
denied those oral orders, and proceeded to censure him as hav- 
ing acted without authority, in that he had anticipated your first 
written order, and begun his preparations for moving before it 
reached him. What ailed you, Sir, that you undertook to play 
the soldier in such a garb as that? Were you frightened out of 
your wits ? or did your quickness of wit beguile you into an »ct 
which honest men cannot appreciate? 



CAMPAIGN ON THE HUDSON. 45 

It is not always easy to catch the aims or divine the motives 
of so intricate and eccentric a moralist as you. Here you had 
achieved a second blunder in ordering General Gillmore to fall 
back ; he being of the opinion, as others also were, that, apart 
from your order, there was no necessity for him to budge an inch. 
It was soon apparent to you, no doubt, that with a fair measure 
of pluck and steadfastness the position, which you had now lost, 
might have been held ; in which case the enemy would soon 
have been forced to relinquish the advantage he had gained in 
another part of the field. Your noble courage, which had oozed 
off so charmingly while the enemy was hot upon you, returned 
in full blast the moment you had none but your subordinates to 
deal with. And so your aim in this case appears to have been 
to outface General Gillmore into assuming, or at least sharing, 
the blame of having lost his position within the enemy's line ; as 
though your ordering him to withdraw had been but an after- 
thought suggested by what you found him already preparing to 
do. 

Perhaps I ought to add that the line of works which Gene- 
ral Gillmore held that morning connected with the system of 
defences on Drury's Bluff, and extended westward across the 
Richmond and Petersburgh Railroad. Ten hours well spent 
in fortifying would have secured your foothold in that most 
important position. As it was, the evening of that day saw 
the whole army back within your line of intrenchments. The 
enemy soon gathered across your front, shut you in, and there 
held you, so that you could not get out. Within eight-and- 
forty hours, trains of cars were running over the road which 
you had so lately controlled, and have been running ever since. 
It was indeed a bad day for you. General ; bad in more senses 
than one. For seven long months two armies have been la- 
bouring with all their might to retrieve the loss of that memora- 
ble day, and have not retrieved it yet. 

And here it may not be amiss to spend a thought or two 
upon your admirable gift of alternate inflation and collapse. 
For you were evidently blown big with presumption when you 



46 GENERAL BUTLER* S 

refused to fortify, as General Gillmore proposed ; and this sig- 
nal act of rashness was followed, as such acts are apt to be, by 
a no less signal act of timidity ; you being, in the hour of trial, 
scared into an abandonment of the position which, in the flush 
of success, you had rashly scorned to strengthen. I suppose 
you find it both convenient and pleasant thus to have your 
*' valiant parts " now distended with arrogance, now crushed 
together with impotence, inversely to the occasion. But I 
hope you will forgive us ordinary mortals, warm questrists of 
amusement as we are, if we indulge now and then in a quiet 
laugh at this your preposterous style of manhood. Of course 
your style is right, Sir, — at least for you ; but this does not 
hinder it from being a little odd ; I have sometimes sinned so 
far as to think it almost comical. I commend you to the study 
of Monsieur Parolles. And, as a relish to the contemplation of 
that noted hero, I will here insert an apt soliloquy of one Cap- 
tain Bessus,"^ merely premising that the Captain has just been 
cowed into surrendering his sword, but is allowed to retain 
his knife ; whereupon he solaces himself with these audible 
thoughts : " I will make better use of this than of my sword. 
A base spirit has this 'vantage of a brave one ; it keeps always 
at a stay ; nothing brings it down, not beating. I remember I 
promised the King, in a great audience, that I would make my 
backbiters eat my sword to a knife. How to get another sword 
I know not ; nor know any means left for me to maintain my 
credit, but impudence : therefore I will outswear him and all 
his followers, that this is all that's left uneaten of my sword." 

Thus much for your two main blunders in that famous ad- 
venture on Proctor's Creek ; which blunders, as described to 
me soon after by Colonel Serrell, were the whole staple of my 
letter to Mr. Godwin ; though the matter has since been fur- 
ther explained and certified to me by other vouchers. And you 
knew that Colonel Serrell gave me that matter ; for I told you 
so, plainly, in our interview, and you believed what I said : I 

♦ A famous character in Beaumont and Fletcher's King and No King. 



CAMPAIGN ON THE HUDSON. 4/ 

read conviction in the lines of your face, as you heard my 
words. Moreover, General Gillmore, as I have already shown, 
had told you twice in writing that he did not give me the mat- 
ter of that letter. So that your proceedings in this case were 
not for the purpose of getting from me what you believed to be 
true, but of making me utter what you knew to be false. But I 
think your " high-erected spirit " must have had rare sport in 
thus employing Colonel Serrell as your undertaker in the busi- 
ness of inducing me to father his own gift on General Gillmore. 
A clever stroke of art. General ! if it showed a good deal of 
knavery, it also showed some wit. 

From the foregoing account it appears that your deplorable 
military blundering m the affair under review was not the worst 
of it. Great as were your mistakes, considerate and kind- 
hearted men might have overlooked them, had you owned 
them frankly like a man, and bravely stood up to the responsi- 
bility of them. I grieve to say that the swift reverse which 
fell upon you failed to elicit any sparks of honour and manhood. 
Nay, more ; whatever virtue there may have been in the lessons 
of that time to bring forth such fruits "in an honest and good 
heart," seems in your case to have fructified in quite another 
sort. To be sure, the blunders could not be undone, nor the 
loss and damage consequent thereon foreclosed. But here was 
at least a good chance for you to acquire the honour of nobly 
acknowledging the fault, though you could not retrieve it. And 
I think all right-minded men will agree that the frank acknowl- 
edgment of such a fault is something better as regards the hon- 
our of a man, than not to have committed it. But it appears 
that you, instead of earning any such praise, were kindled just 
the reverse : either because you were so unmanned by the 
events of the day as not to know what you did, or else from an 
innate something which I refrain from wording as it is, you 
endeavoured to fasten upon him who had counselled you well the 
very consequences proceeding from your own fatal rejection of 
his counsel. And you have ever since been seeking to revenge 
your blunders on those whose only crime was that of knowing 



48 GENERAL BUTLER's 

and lamenting them. From your manner of dealing with me, 
one would suppose your huge miscarriage had never happened, 
if I had not gone and told of it. Did you imagine that by pun- 
ishing me for grieving aloud over your fault you could really 
make me guilty, and yourself free ? 

What, then, had you in all this business to bottom any decent 
plea of right or even expediency upon ? I had but given, in 
the form of a private letter, a fair and honest statement of what 
I had fairly and honestly learned touching the matter in ques- 
tion. But suppose I had done this avowedly for publica- 
tion, with my usual signature, still it was at the worst but a 
military offence ; there was no breach of essential morality in it ; 
nothing to call for any extra-judicial infliction ; and therefore it 
ought not on any account to have been visited beyond the strict 
requirements of military law : whereas you did nothing but 
violate the law in my case, and this for the purpose of a severity 
far greater than the law would award. Do you think, by such 
ignoble and unmanly abuse of military power, to stifle the hon- 
est convictions of men respecting you, or to purchase exemption 
from the just responsibility of your acts ? Who, what, I pray, 
are you. Sir, that you should take upon you, against the law, 
and without a trial, to punish men for a candid and liberal 
expression of judgment about you? This is mere tyranny. Sir, 
and tyranny of a very bad kind ; such as, if unchecked, can 
hardly fail to quench the life of all true soldiership under you. 
Nor is mine by any means a solitary case : your military career 
has notoriously been replete with like instances of arbitrary and 
unlawful punishment. And what think you has been the effect? 
to make the men respect you ? No, Sir ; not a bit of it : it has 
merely set them to execrating you, or to making fun of you, 
and venting broad jokes about you. And, as you have been 
going on, no officer worthy of his title could think his reputa- 
tion safe with you : all must feel themselves put to the alter- 
native of being at odds with you, or else of becoming your 
creatures ; either of which is fatal to the spirit and efficiency of 
an army. Therefore — I speak advisedly — therefore some of 



CAMPAIGN ON THE HUDSON. 49 

the very best officers in your command have withdrawn from 
the service, or have asked to be relieved, on the ground that 
they could not possibly serve under you either with benefit to 
the cause or with credit to themselves. And what could we 
expect, under such a rule as yours, but that the angel of respect 
and confidence should give place to the demon of hatred and 
distrust ? men meeting each other with chilled looks and stag- 
gering eyes ; drawing the cloak of suspiciousness tight about 
them, and moving as though they dared not say their souls 
were their own ; hardly speaking together but in whispers, and 
constantly on the alert lest some of your prowlers and inform- 
ers might be eyeing them. Such is the style of military order 
and discipline which your genius creates about you. And, 
instead of that which should accompany your place, " as honour, 
love, obedience, troops of friends," you have — are you aware 
of it, Sir ? — 

" Curses, not loud, but deep, mouth-honour, breath. 
Which the poor heart would fain deny, but dare not." 

Indeed, Sir, you greatly overween in thinking, as you seem 
to have done, that this war was gotten up, under Providence, 
mainly to the end of furnishing you with a world to bustle, and 
play the autocrat, and promulgate yourself, and air your smart- 
ness in. The people of this nation, and even we men of the 
army, have, or think we have, a higher concern, a more sacred 
duty, than to push and crouch and wrangle for the privilege of 
walking about meanly conspicuous betwixt your legs. And 
some of us, at least, have other work to do besides smoking 
your blunders and failures out of the public eye. But you " had 
got the whip-hand of everybody " ? Ah ! Sir, that was a mis- 
take ; you never had any such thing. Well, General, you, in 
the pride and insolence of unaccustomed power, — robes which 
upstarts seldom know how to wear, — have been strutting through 
your brief term of adventitious greatness, apparently not remem- 
bering those old maxims, that " a haughty spirit goeth before 
a fall," and that "the prosperity of fools shall destroy them." 



50 GENERAL BUTLERS 

As you seemed to be taken with "a strong delusion " about 
General Gillmore, — such a dekision as often leads men to " be- 
lieve a lie," — I am minded to add a few words more touching 
the matter between him and you. 

1 repeat that, if General Gillmore had been forging any plots 
or working any arts against you, I knew nothing of them what- 
soever. You accused me of being in a conspiracy with him. I 
submit that, if he have the mind of a conspirator, he knows bet- 
ter than to take a man like me into an enterprise of that sort. 
And I owe it to him to say, that I have never heard him speak 
an unkind or disrespectful word of you. But then, if he had 
any such to speak, I was probably one of the last persons in the 
world that he would have been likely to speak them to. For the 
little intercourse I had held with him, though altogether ami- 
cable, had nothing of the confidential in it. And I suspect 
that gentleman is not much used to " unpack his heart with 
words " in denunciation of his official brethren. Be that as it 
may, I had all along believed you both to be good men and 
true ; and my deepest wish had been, that the best talents and best 
services of you both might be forthcoming in the great cause of 
the Nation. But I had lived in the world long enough to know 
that good men sometimes misunderstand one another, and so 
fall at odds. And if it was so with you, that was not my busi- 
ness, nor had I made it my business. I was willing, in my 
place, to fight with or for either or both of you against the reb- 
els ; but I was not willing to fight with or for either of you 
against the other. And I must say. General, that in my poor 
judgment the little time and thought you have spent in perse- 
cuting me had far better been spent in prosecuting the great 
war of the Union. Depend upon it, such an use of your powers 
would have fructified more to your credit. 

As for yourself, it is true I did not believe you to be a great 
general, nor even capable of becoming one. Neither do I be- 
lieve it now, your campaigning against Richmond and your 
bull-penning of me having alike failed to convince me of it. I 
grant you to be a man of quick, sharp, and ready parts ; you 



CAMPAIGN ON THE HUDSON. 5t 

have a very considerable gift of practical adroitness, which you 
seem to mistake for wisdom ; your brain is as fertile as an old 
barn-yard, though its up-growth is neither wholesome nor sweet ; 
even in your best preparations we still find you dabbling in the 
dirt of vulgar smartness and clap-trap. I believe you manage 
to get more official brain-sprouts before the public than all the 
rest of our generals put together ; and nearly every one of them 
has some jerk or snap of Butlerism which is neither wise nor in 
good taste. These fond and fluent spurts appear to be the orts 
or old-ends of your long practice at blackguarding and abusing 
witnesses. They may answer as ear-ticklers for the groundlings, 
before whom you have been used to perform; but they are much 
too theatrical for a well-ordered stage, and none but third-rate 
or fourth-rate actors ever affect them. At all events, such issues 
are not the right style of a solid and symmetrical manhood : an 
Englishman would be apt to say they smell of the Old Bailey ; 
a sensible American might regard them as doing well enough 
for a Tombs lawyer, but not just the thing for a general in the 
field. Besides, you have been performing in that kind long 
enough : what was at first a rather entertaining exhibition, has 
got " played out " into an uncomely exposure : the wit, if there 
be any in it, is of the cheapest sort, and can no longer raise a 
laugh, save at your own expense. 

I have said that I had not believed you capable of becoming 
a great general. But I never had the least objection to your 
becoming such. On the contrary, if you had soldiered your 
way to honour and distinction, I should have been right glad of 
it ; most assuredly I should. No one rejoiced at your success 
more heartily than I did ; no one prayed more earnestly that 
you might still succeed. The capture of Richmond by you 
would have made me fairly leap for joy. But I question 
whether your "gentle exercise and proof of arms" on me has 
greatly furthered your reputation for soldiership. When a man 
is hunting tigers, he should not turn aside, no, not for an instant, 
to catch and tease a mouse. Your great campaign on the James 
in May was not successful. I confess you succeeded better in 



52 GENERAL BUTLER S 

your little campaign of September on the Hudson ; and yet not 
very much better, after all. 

For, General, permit me to assure you that in this latter 
enterprise your proceedings were something ill-judged. For, 
in the first place, the fact of your grand miscarriage could not 
possibly be smothered up from the world ; the public would 
have known and appreciated it just the same, though I had 
never written a word about it. In the second place, it was 
very evident that the natural effect of your course with me 
would be, to convince the public of the truth of what I had 
written about you, however they may have doubted it before. 
It was therefore supremely unwise in you to think of refuting 
my statements, or of reversing the public judgment, by letting 
loose your vindictiveness on me. That a man of your hardness 
should do wrong to another, is not so strange. But I marvel 
that a man of your shrewdness should commit so great a blun- 
der in so small a matter. Just think of it : You had made a 
fool of yourself in certain military doings ; I had told of your 
folly ; to be revenged on me for this, you then went and made 
a fool of .yourself a second time. What you should have re- 
sented was your own blundering, not my exposure of it. Sup- 
pose you had crushed my body into the dust ; or, worse, 
suppose you had crushed my spirit into uttering that about 
General Gillmore which I knew to be false ; what could this 
have done towards retrieving your miscarriages ? or even towards 
altering the public verdict respecting them ? Believe me, there 
were other and better ways of approving your generalship than 
by insulting and browbeating a defenceless chaplain. Let me 
tell you. Sir, that, if you would be distinguished as a general, 
you will have to do something besides oppressing and torment- 
ing so impotent and so insignificant a being as myself. Shame, 
shame on you, General Butler ! For decency's sake, " assume 
a virtue, if you have it not." 

Sincerely yours, &c., 

H. N. Hudson. 



CAMPAIGN ON THE HUDSON. 53 



POSTSCRIPT. 

In the foregoing letter I have expressed the conviction, that 
it was never your purpose to have me tried. This conviction 
has been strengthened rather than impaired by what has since 
occurred. On being removed from your late command, as my 
case was rather prominent among those brought against you, you 
tlien turned and made charges against me. I have not yet seen 
those charges, and know not what they are, though I have looked 
diligently, and as far as I could, to find a copy of them. It was 
your business to see that a copy was served on me. That you 
have not done so, is proof enough, both in law and in reason, 
that you still did not mean to give me the benefit of a trial. 

At the time the charges were made, I was at home on leave 
of absence by the Lieutenant-General. When my leave was 
out, which was on the 26th of January, I returned to my regi- 
ment, and there have remained till this day, waiting to hear from 
you. My term of service has now expired. You have had 
ample time. Sir, for carrying out any honest purpose of a trial ; 
and I am under no sort of obligation, either in duty or honour, 
to wait any longer for you. I learn, on good authority, that, 
though the charges were not made till after your removal, yet 
you dated them back several days before that event. Of course, 
this was done to hide the glaring anachronism of your proceed- 
ings, — another bald and blear-eyed trick of yours. And it is the 
opinion of those most competent to judge in the matter, that, 
on being called to account for your criminal treatment of me, 
you thought it necessary to patch up something, in order to 
break or parry the force of what was charged upon you. It 
was vain to tinker at your broken cause in that way, but I sup- 
pose you must still be false. The power with which you had so 
long oppressed and insulted me was not incorporate with you ; 
the meanness was. 

In addition to your other heroisms, you are now the hero of 
Fort Fisher, — a very fitting consummation of your military 



54 GENERAL BUTLER S 

career. I believe a good deal in the sagacity and wisdom of 
President Lincoln ; and, when you were ordered to report at 
Lowell, I presume it was because he judged that you could serve 
the country better there than anywhere else. I have read your 
Lowell speech. Of course I did not fail to observe the freedom 
with which you there criticised and censured the military doings 
of the Lieutenant-General. Your virtue is certainly of a very 
eccentric habit. In that speech, you made no scruple of doing, 
in the most aggravated and most offensive form, the very thing 
which you " punished " me for having done in the most excus- 
able form. But you are now a fallen man, and so I forbear ; 
indeed, I would not have said so much, but that your mean- 
spirited vindictiveness towards me has manifestly survived your 
fall. 

H. N. H. 

Camp First New- York Volunteer Engineers, 
Army of the James, Feb. 13, 1865. 



CAMPAIGN ON THE HUDSON. 55 



APPENDIX. 



A. 

"Headquarters Armies of the United States, 

" Washington, D. C, May 23rd, 1865. 

" My dear Hudson : 

"Your letter of the 19th has reached me. I 
was glad to hear from you. I have no hesitation in complying 
with your request, and herewith enclose an official copy of 
Lieutenant-General Grant's endorsement on the charges pre- 
ferred against you by Major-General Butler. You are at liberty 
to make any use of it you please. 

" Very truly 

" Your Friend, 
(Signed) ''T. S. Bowers." 

" Endorsement on charges and specifications by General 
Butler against Chaplain Henry Hudson, ist N. Y. E., who 
tenders his resignation. 

'' Respectfully forwarded to the Secretary of War, and the 
acceptance of Chaplain Hudson's resignation recommended. 

"These papers were forwarded to me by Major-General 
Butler from Fort IMonroe, after he was relieved from duty, and 
after an inspection or inquiry was made in the case of Chaplain 
Hudson, by Brevet Brigadier-General E. Schriver, Inspector 
General, U.S.A., under my orders, (which report of inspection 
is herewith forwarded). 

" By reference to the Statement of Chaplain Hudson in said 
report of inspection, it will be seen that at the date of said ten- 
der of resignation there were no charges preferred against him, 
but that he was on duty with his regiment, havnng been released 
from arrest (close) by General I'utler's order, after a confine- 
ment in the Provost-Guard prison, from the 15th of Se^Dtembei' 



56 GENERAL BUTLER'S 

until the nth day of November. The reason recited in said 
order relieving him from such arrest, for his long-continued 
arrest, was ' because of the impossibility of convening a Court 
Martial to try him, because of movements in the field ' ; when 
in fact, within the month immediately prior to that date, a Gen- 
eral Court Martial was in session at General Butler's Head- 
quarters in the field, convened by his orders. — General Butler 
now (Jan. 14th) says ' he could not be earlier tried, because 
he (Gen. Butler) being the prosecutor had no means of order- 
ing the Court.' It was General Butler's bounden duty, espe- 
cially when the harsh manner in which he dealt with the accused 
is taken into consideration, to have made out and forwarded the 
charges against him to tlie proper authority, within the time 
required by law, but which he neglected to do. 

" By further reference to the Inspector-General's report, and 
the date of the charges in the case, it will be seen that, from 
the arrest and confinement of Chaplain Hudson until the pre- 
ferring of the charges, a period of three months and eighteen 
days intervened, fifty-three days of which he was in close arrest. 

'' It is in consideration of all these facts, and without excusing 
Chaplain Hudson for his disobedience of orders, that I recom- 
mend the acceptance of his resignation. 

"U. S. Grant, 

" Lt. General. 
" Hdqrs. Armies of the U. S., 

"City Polnt, Va., February 2d, 1865. 

"Official Copy. 

(Signed) *' T. S. Bowers, 

"Asst. Adjt. General." 



CAMPAIGN ON THE HUDSON. 57 



B. 



"War Department, A. G. O,, 
" Washington, 

"February loth, 1865. 
"Special Orders, No. 66. 

" ' Extract.' 

" Having tendered his resignation, the following-named 
officer is HONOURABLY DISCHARGED from the military 
service of the United States, with condition that he shall receive 
no final payments until he satisfies the Pay Department that he 
is not indebted to the Government. 

"Chaplain Henry Hudson, ist New- York Engineers Vols. 

" By order of the Secretary of War. 

(Signed) " E. D. Townsend, 

" Assistant Adjutant General." 

" I CERTIFY, That the above is a true copy, and tliat I have 
this day paid the above-named discharged officer ^264.50, in 
full from December ist, 1864, to February loth, 1865. 

(Signed) " Wm. B. Rochester, 

" Paymaster U. S. Vols. 
"Washington, February 15th, 1865." 



In explanation of some points in the above, it may be well to 
add that, before my resignation was accepted, or at least before 
I knew of its being accepted, my term of enlistment expired, 
and I got from the local authorities a regular certificate of dis- 
charge, just such as was always given in such cases. On reach- 
ing Washington, I found the discharge upon my resignation 
already made out for me ; so I took the latter, and left the 
other in the War Department. 



5? GENERAL BUTLEr's 

C. 

Extract from the testimony given by General Grant before 
the Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War, Washington, 
February it, 1865. 

" By Mr. Odell : 

" Question. Do you know any thing about Chaplain Hudson? 

" A?tswer. I had that case investigated, but I cannot give 
the exact result of the investigation. The man was confined 
for fifty-odd days in what is called the bull-pen, near General 
Butler's headquarters, I understand, — put in with deserters and 
all sorts of prisoners. The investigation shows that he was 
there that length of time without charges and without trial ; 
though, during a good part of the time he was there. General 
Butler had a court-martial sitting right at his headquarters, and 
could have tried him. 

" By the Chairman : 

" Question. How long ago was that? 

" A7tswer, He was confined there during the Fall, in the 
months of September, October, and November. He was 
released while General Butler was in New- York City, at the 
time of the election. He was released on the 9th of Novem- 
ber, I think. 

" Question. When did the case come to your knowledge? 

" Answer. I received a letter from a lady here in this city 
telling me about the case. I immediately ordered Chaplain 
Hudson to report to me, and then I had the case investigated. 
The man had been all this time in confinement without my 
knowledge. 

" Question. Without any charges? 

" Answer. Never had any charges preferred against him 
until after General Butler was relieved. 

^^ Question. What was alleged against him? 

" Answer. Absence without leave, I believe ; and there may 
be other charges. All the papers in the case are now in this city. 
No officer has a right to confine a commissioned officer in a 



CAMPAIGN ON THE HUDSON. 59 

prison or guard-house, except for mutiny, or for some offence 
where it would not be safe to trust the man at large. A com- 
missioned officer, for ordinary breaches of military discipline, is 
put under arrest. This was only a case of that sort, for which 
he should not have been confined at all, except in his own tent, 
under arrest. When this case came to my knowledge, I 
immediately ordered an examination made of all the prisoners 
about Norfolk, Fort Munroe, and Portsmouth, to see if there 
were any more such cases. 

" By Mr. Odell : 

" Question. What was the result of your examination ? 

" Answer, The result was to find a great many persons in 
prison without charges. Some had been there for a great 
length of time. 

" Question. In the bull-pen? 

^^ Answer. Bull-pen is merely the name given by the men 
themselves to a guard-house or prison. When prisoners are first 
brought in, they are put there until they can be sent off to other 
prisons or guard-houses, or can be tried and disposed of. It is 
a place in charge of the provost-guard. 

" Question. Were those men placed there by order of Gen- 
eral Butler? 

^^ Answer. They were placed there by his provost-marshalls and 
officers. In many instances there was nothing at all to show by 
whom they were put there. I have not only ordered an exami- 
nation to be made of all the prisoners there, but I intend send- 
ing inspectors to make an examination of all prisons in all the 
departments, with authority to correct all such abuses that they 
may find." 

D. 

"Headquarters, Dept. of Virginia and North Carolina, 

"In the Field, Va., May 26th, 1864. 

'* General : I see by an article in the New- York Herald^ 
said to be derived from authentic sources, that General Gill- 
more earnestly advised me ' to make his (my) position secure 



60 GENERAL BUTLER's 

by entrenchments against sorties or any movements of the 
enemy, to oust us from them,' when before Fort Darling ; and 
that I answered ' that I could not pause for defensive prepara- 
tion.' This is the first I ever heard of this. Did you, or do 
you, authorize it? Please answer, and correct an injustice. 
" Very Respectfully, Your ob't Servant, 
(Signed) "Benj. F. Butler, Maj.-Gen'l Com'd'g. 

" Maj.-Gen'l Q. A. Gillmore, Com'd'g loth Army Corps." 

"Headquarters ioth Army Corps, May 26th, 1864. 

"Col. Serrell, N. Y. Vol. Engineers, who examined the line of 
works captured in front of Drury's Bluff, and was directed to 
submit to Maj.-Gen. Butler a plan for shortening it, and facing 
it towards Richmond, will report the action he took in the 
matter. 

(Signed) " Q. A. Gillmore, Maj.-Gen'l Com'd'g," 

" Headquarters N.Y. Vol. Engineers, May 27th, 1864. 
" I took Gen. Gillmore's note of May 15, 10.49 a.m., to Maj.- 
Gen. Butler, remarking to him, that General Gillmore directed 
me to say something about changing the enemy's lines, we there 
occupied, to defences for ourselv^es ; to which Gen. Butler re- 
plied, * Say to Gen. Gillmore, we are on the offensive, not 
defensive ; he need have no apprehension about his left.' I 
immediately returned, and so reported to Gen. Gillmore in the 
presence of several officers. 

" Respectfully, &c., 
(Signed) " Edw. W. Serrell, Col. Eng'rs N.Y. Vol." 

"Headquarters ioth Army Corps, May 27th, 1864. 
" Respectfully returned to Maj.-Gen. Butler. The following 
is a copy of the note which Col. Serrell carried : 

"'Headquarters ioth A.C, 
"*In the Field, May 15, 1864, 10.49 a.m. 
"'Maj.-Gen. Butler, Com'd'g Dept., &c.: 

" * General : If the enemy threaten our left seriously, I have 
not enough force here to occupy all the line taken from the 



CAMPAIGN ON THE HUDSON. 6 1 

enemy. I am sorry my Corps is so split up. If we don't oc- 
cupy the extreme left, it will be necessary to withdraw beyond 
range of that position. I send Col. SerreH to get your views, as 
I can't leave just now. Very Respectfully, 

(Signed) "'Q. A. Gillmore, Maj.-Gen'l.' 

"The result of Col. Serrell's visit to Maj.-Gen'l Butler was 
reported to me verbally by the Colonel in the presence of other 
officers ; which accounts for the fact that it was no secret. It 
is needless for me to say that the publication of the facts was 
unknown to, and unauthorized, by me. I have not seen the 
article from which the New- York Herald claims to have derived 
its information. I understand it was an editorial. 

(Signed) " Q. A. Gillmore, Maj.-Gen'l." 

E. 

"Ill Remsen Street, Brooklyn, N.Y., Nov. 21st, 1864. 

" My Dear Sir : I have been intending to write you, ever 
since you got into trouble with Gen. Butler, to express my sym- 
pathy for you, and my deep regrets that I should have been the 
innocent cause of the injustice that has been visited upon you. 

" When in Washington, some time since, I appealed to the 
Secretary of War in your behalf, and left with him the copy of 
your Statement to Gen. Butler, and the letter which accom- 
panied it to Mr. Nash. The Secretary said you would be 
released ; and I have since learned that you have been, or at 
least partially so. You have a host of friends here, and they all 
appear very desirous for your entire release, and your vindica- 
tion before the public. 

" I assure you that I am truly and deeply grateful for the 
precautions taken by you to place my own vindication in the 
hands of your friends, to be used in case of necessity. 

" I hope to see you among us very soon. 

" Most truly your friend, 

(Signed) " Q. A. Gillmore. 

" Rev. Mr. Hudson." 



62 GENERAL BUTLER's CAMPAIGN ON THE HUDSON. 

F. 

"Litchfield, Conn., Feb. 9th, 1866. 
" Rev. H. N. Hudson, 

" Dear Sir : Yours of the 29th ult., referring to my visit to 
you in company with Chaplain Jarvis, while you were held as a 
prisoner by Gen. Butler, and asking if I will favour you with 
a brief statement of the circumstances, as I remember them, 
was duly received. 

*' In October, 1864, I was in Virginia in the execution of a 
commission from Governor Buckingham, and learned for the 
first time your situation. On the 21st., I think, of that month, 
we visited you ; we found you confined near Gen. Butler's * old 
headquarters,' in the rear of the Bermuda Hundred Lines; 
Gen. B. having then removed his headquarters to the north of 
the James, leaving a Lieutenant and a few men in charge of 
yourself and your fellow-prisoners. We first called on the 
Lieutenant for permission to see you ; it was granted ; and we 
were conducted to the enclosure in which your tent was situated, 
just in the edge of the woods. This enclosure was about fifty 
feet square, I should think, and the enclosing fence was con- 
structed of posts and top-rails, entirely surrounding your tent 
and those of the other prisoners. Outside of this was the 
guards' or sentinels' beat. 

" Your own appearance, as you stepped from your tent, was 
so worn and haggard, that, although I had known you so well, I 
hesitated to call you by name, until Chai)lain Jarvis had first 
spoken. Your own clothing and bed-covering, I recollect, 
seemed wholly insufiicient for the season ; and the additions 
which Chaplain Jarvis made thereto appeared much needed. 
On leaving, we bid you good-bye at the railing, you not being 
allowed to accompany us further. 

" With kindest regards to yourself and family, in which your 
friends here unite, 

" I remain. Yours truly, 

(Signed) "Geo. M. Woodruff." 



GENERAL BUTLERS 



CAMPAIGN ON THE HUDSON. 



^ccourt EAitiovu 



WITH AN APPENDIX. 



liOSTOX : 
riUXTKl) WX J. S. CUSIIIXG N: (O. 



